


Burn Down The Disco

by snurgle



Category: Black Mirror, ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 | JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Break Up, Cookies, Crossover, Dating, Developing Relationship, Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, Far Future, Fluff and Angst, Getting Back Together, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I have no self control, M/M, Multiple Relationships, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Science Fiction, Slow Burn, Technology, Threesome, characters are stuck in a dating sim, not the food, that happens at one point, the computer kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-09 09:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 70,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16447640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snurgle/pseuds/snurgle
Summary: Joseph joined the system in the hopes of finding his soulmate after years of failing to find a meaningful relationship. After one 18-hour match with a man who's barely more than a stranger to him, he quickly realizes that maybe surrendering control of his love life to a supercomputer may not have been such a good idea. The system is about to bring him much more than he bargained for.





	1. Caesar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cicada_s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicada_s/gifts).



> Wow. It's only been a whole ass year since the last time I wrote anything new to put up here.  
> Since then, I've made this. Now here I am, barely awake, but still dead-set on posting it.  
> Welcome to my latest in a long line of shitwrecks spanning all the way back to my freshman year of high school. It's been years. After all this time of lingering out here in oblivion and feeling too mentally exhausted to write and receiving a message from a fan or two about a story I wrote 3 years ago that I probably won't ever finish, I'm finally back in the game. I have new interests, new content lined up in production, I'm going to take the plunge and attempt NaNoWriMo for the first time ever and let's just say this is all going to get much worse very fast.  
> Strap in.
> 
> However, because this is my first time writing for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, probably nobody here knows or cares who I am. But if you're returning to me after my hiatus, welcome. Glad to see you back. Take your shoes off before you come in and mind the carpet. Let me make you some tea that I definitely haven't pissed in.  
> God I hope that joke lands with somebody. Anyway, you're here to read. Let's not forget that.  
> If anyone here isn't familiar already, this is a story about Joseph Joestar, steals most of its characters from Battle Tendency and is based almost entirely on the episode Hang the DJ from season 4 of Black Mirror. (I definitely didn't just rewrite the plot and put JJBA characters in it.) I want so deeply to thank all my friends who listened to me whine endlessly about this story over the 7 months it took me to write it, and especially my gal pal Jasmine and my friend cicada_s, who were my lovely beta readers in these trying times and both of whom I made cry because I'm awful and love to hurt people. Thank you so much and because you've both finished reading this disaster, I can finally post it here.  
> Before we continue this venture, I need to add a quick CONTENT WARNING for ALCOHOL USE that I forgot to put in this note when I first posted this story. That's important.
> 
> And now for something completely different.

 

Joseph found the restaurant in the middle of the downtown entertainment district, exactly where the tiny white instructional pod in his pocket had directed him. He was given explicit instructions to arrive there at 7pm sharp. He had expected that such an operation would have been run with clockwork precision. But, being who he was, Joseph was now standing nervously outside the glass storefront, twenty minutes late for his first date with the system.

The warm glow of the lights beckoned him inside, and his nerves hummed with anxiety as he let the door sweep him into the building. As he walked in, he had to catch his breath. It was a much swankier place than anything he was used to, much more similar to a restaurant his family might pick for a special occasion than somewhere he would go for anything as casual and tentative as a first date. Suddenly he felt horrendously underdressed. 

Joseph dug his hand into his pocket and found the his directive pod. He pressed his thumb to the screen and spoke quietly into the microphone. “Are you sure this is the right place?” he asked.

The pod issued a  _ blip _ , letting him know his query had been heard. “This is the correct destination,” it responded to him in a hollow, automated voice. “Your match is sitting at table thirty-eight, towards the back of the seating area. You are currently running twenty-two minutes late.”

Joseph huffed and slipped the pod back into his pocket. The very last thing he needed to be reminded of was how badly he had already screwed up. He wasn’t used to formal dates, and the setting only made it that much worse. Right then, his button-down and jeans were the only comfortable thing about him.

Reluctantly, he made his way toward the back of the restaurant. The round, velvet-upholstered booths seemed cozy, at least. Small place cards denoted the numbers of each table, and he read through them as he walked, his gaze following their upward progression towards a table in the back. Then he froze.

His hand shaking, Joseph roughly fished the pod out of his pocket again. “Are you sure that’s the right one?” he asked it.

“Affirmative,” came the emotionless reply. “Please approach the table and seat yourself. You are currently running-”

He unceremoniously shoved the pod back into his pocket.  _ Better late than never _ , he thought bitterly as he made his way toward the table. He stopped at the edge of it and stared, his heart pounding. “Hi,” he said. “Um... table thirty-eight, right?”

A blonde-haired man sat on the opposite side of the table, facing outward from the corner. He held a book in front of him, which he didn’t look up from when Joseph spoke to him. “There’s a numbered card on the table,” he said. “I’d assume you can read it.” His voice had a gentle, lilting accent when he spoke, which somehow emphasized the irritation behind his words.

Joseph felt a sting of embarrassment, then sat down at the table across from the man. “I suppose this makes you my date tonight, then,” he said, letting slip a nervous giggle. 

The man raised his head and his eyebrows arched, his face reading surprise. “You?” he said, his voice tinged with confusion.

Joseph laughed again, if only because he didn't seem able to do much else. “Apparently. I don’t think the system is programmed to make mistakes.”

The stranger across the table moved his hand and let his book flip shut. “Well, it must be,” he quipped, “since it apparently told you to show up late.”

The shameful heat of a blush rose to Joseph’s face and he looked down, breaking eye contact with the stranger. That turned out to be a mistake, because it forced Joseph to notice his silk shirt, satin tie and brocade vest. Joseph’s lack of formality now felt downright criminal. He was so out of his element, he might have found it funny if it were happening to anyone else but him. 

“Y-yeah, it, uh... it didn’t,” he stuttered. “That was on me. See, I kind of took longer than expected to get ready, and, um... you don’t particularly care, do you?”

“You can go on about it if you want,” his match replied. “We’ll need something to talk about while we’re here. But you might want to place your order first. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve already placed mine. I had kind of a long day and didn’t get a chance to eat since this morning.”

“Oh. Alright.”

Before Joseph got a chance, one of the waitstaff came by and took the laminated sheet of paper away. “Sorry. System mandate,” the server said upon receiving the hurt look he sent in their direction. “Mostly just the late arrival. But it’s based on your input preferences. If there’s an issue, feel free to let me know.” The server was gone before Joseph could say anything more on the subject.

When he turned back to his match, he saw a subtle look of pity on his face. That was something no one ever wanted to see on a first date. Desperate to save face, he went on talking. “Well, uh... never mind that, I suppose. If we’re going to be stuck together from now on, I may as well know your name.”

The man across from Joseph met his gaze. In that moment, he felt completely arrested. He didn’t think he’d ever seen eyes so green on any living person before. “I’m Caesar,” he said. “And you are?”

“Joseph.” The one-word reply felt pitifully weak. “Should we, um... do you want to check our deadline? Just so we don’t get off on the wrong foot or anything.”

Caesar seemed a little perplexed as to what he meant by that, but he reached into his pocket anyway, prompting Joseph to do the same. They both held the little round pods in the palms of their hands. Their eyes met for another second. “I’ll count us down,” Caesar offered, his thumb in place. “Three, two, one.”

They both tapped their screens in synch, and a timer showed up.  _ 18 hours _ . Upon seeing it, Joseph felt a wave of relief wash through him. At least until Caesar spoke up again. “That seems a little short, for getting to know a person,” he said, sounding dismal.

“You think so?” Joseph inquired, putting his pod away again. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s just that it doesn’t seem realistic,” he elaborated. “I don’t think that compatibility between two people can be accurately gauged in so little time. And the system’s whole selling point is making perfect matches.”

“Maybe it’s just starting us off slow,” Joseph said. “I mean, you can’t expect someone to know exactly who they want the moment they meet. I’d assume you take baby steps, have some short flings, then you go into the more serious stuff. It’s not like they’ll marry you off to someone right away. At least I don’t think they do that. God, I hope they don’t.”

A smirk twitched at the corner of Caesar’s lips. “Is that your way of telling me that this is your first time here?”

Joseph’s face burned even hotter than before. “Was it that obvious?”

“Please. You’re a wreck, Joseph. I had to assume there was a reason.”

“Well, you don’t have to rub it in my face.”

Before they could go any further, the server had reappeared carrying a tray loaded up with plates, which were promptly set down in front of both of them. Joseph was pleased to find that the system had picked out grilled salmon with a side of crab cakes for him. A bowl of something dark and savory-smelling was placed in front of Caesar. Lastly, there was a bottle of pinot noir, which Joseph gladly popped open. He was going to need at least a light buzz to get through the next 18 hours without falling to pieces.

Caesar stuck a fork into the shallow bowl in front of him, and the black stuff twined itself around the prongs. “What is that?” Joseph asked. 

“Pasta al nero di seppia,” his date replied flatly. “I don’t find it in many places, so if it’s available, it’s usually what I get.”

Joseph nodded and thought on that for a moment, picking at his salmon. A moment later, he spoke up again. “You’re Italian, aren’t you?”

Caesar raised an eyebrow at him again, looking up from the bowl of pasta. “What gave it away?” he asked.

“Your accent, first of all. The fact that your name is Caesar, then ordering obscure pasta on a first date. It was pretty obvious. Like you fell right out of a pulp fiction trope.”

Caesar harshly set his fork down and glared at Joseph. “Are you calling me a stereotype?”

“Not really,” Joseph replied. “More like a caricature. I just found it funny.” He laughed nervously again, his mouth trying its hardest to smile, but the look on Caesar’s face told him plainly enough that he wasn’t finding it funny. Joseph cleared his throat and looked away again, taking another swig of wine to get the taste of his own shitty joke out of his mouth.

“Well...  _ brit boy _ ,” Caesar tossed back after a moment. “What do you do for a living?”

Joseph nearly choked on the wine in his mouth. He set down the glass and got his breath back. “Alright, I guess that’s fair. But what part of Great Britain?”

“London. You sound expressly urban to me.”

Joseph eyed Caesar over the rim of his wine glass. “You’re good,” he remarked. “Have any other hidden talents I should be aware of?”

“Only ones you’ll need to earn the right to know about,” Caesar replied.

“Is that your way of flirting with me?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you figure it out?”

The next few minutes passed in stiff, awkward silence. Joseph didn’t know what to say. He felt like a blank slate; in that moment, he couldn’t think of anything even remotely interesting to say about himself. He couldn’t seem to remember what he did for a living, what his hobbies were, anything that might be of note to mention. He could only stare down at his plate and occasionally glance up at Caesar, who seemed perfectly content to ignore him completely. He was so indifferent to his presence, it nearly struck Joseph as an insult.

“Well, you already know that I’m new to the system,” he said after what felt like the longest dinner he had ever sat through. Their plates had been cleared away, and the pods had yet to tell them what their next activity of the night was supposed to be. “You never told me if you were too. Although it really seems like you aren’t.”

“Look at that. You’re finally wrong about something,” Caesar replied sardonically.

Joseph’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you could have told me sooner is all. I think it might have helped.”

“Helped what?” Caesar looked at him across the table, his face scathingly judgemental. “You showed up late, you’re underdressed, and you’ve been stumbling all over introductions. I don’t think you need to be a veteran of dating to know that’s all very bad form.”

“In my defense, I’m not usually introduced to people like this,” Joseph said indignantly.

“Like what?”

“Like...  _ this _ !” he repeated, gesturing spastically at the room around them. “With the fancy restaurant, and the crystal chandeliers, and the satin tie, and... ugh! If I had known about it, I would have been made up properly, but when I thought _first date_ , I wasn’t imagining a banquet with the fucking prime minister!”

Caesar visibly bristled as the curse shot past Joseph’s lips, but Joseph couldn’t bring himself to care. At that point, he’d gotten a few drinks into himself, and he was just about over his nerves. That left him with discomfort, dissatisfaction and just a touch of anger.

“Then tell me, what exactly is a first date to you?” Caesar asked sharply.

“I... I don’t know,” Joseph admitted. “It’s never this formal. It’s never set-up or predetermined. Usually just going to a place, meeting whoever happens to be there, and seeing where it goes.”

“So you’re used to playing the field?”

Now it was Joseph’s turn to be insulted. “I never said that.”

“Really? Because it sounded to me like you’re into off-chance hookups rather than actual relationships.”

“They’re not  _ always _ like that.”

“How often are they not?”

“Often enough.”

“Suuuuure.” Caesar drew the word out, and the implication behind it grated on Joseph like little else could. “You must be a real romantic, Mr. 18-hours-is-long-enough-for-me.”

“Oh, really? And let me guess. You’ve had nothing but textbook perfect dates before me, and I’ve ruined your streak.”

Caesar fell silent, chewing at his lip and looking down at his wine glass. Joseph couldn’t help feeling a little victorious. “I haven’t had the time for it,” he mumbled.

“Excuse me, what was that?” Joseph jeered. “It sounds to me like you haven’t dated at all.”

“It’s not like there was nothing voluntary about it!” Caesar retorted. “Maybe I want a relationship but I don’t live the sort of life that lets me just fuck off and meet people whenever I want. I have a job, you know.”

“Which is what?” Joseph pried.

At that, Caesar paused. He stared at Joseph, his mouth hanging open a little. “It’s not like it’ll be of any interest to you. You only have me for fifteen more hours anyway.”

“And what are we supposed to be doing for fifteen hours? Jerking each other off? It’s not like we even know where we’re supposed to go after this.”

“Do you think there’s going to be some kind of penalty if we don’t follow the system’s every command? It’s a dating service, not a prison experiment.”

“But it might as well be. It’s my first day. I barely even know where in the city I am.”

“So are you planning to just do whatever the system tells you?”

“I thought that was what we were all doing.”

“There’s supposed to be an element of choice. Otherwise the system wouldn’t work.”

“But if we’re in here deciding things on our own, why would we bother using the system at all?”

“It’s...” Caesar stammered, trying to form the rest of his argument. “It’s more complicated than that. You don’t just date whoever it throws your way and complicitly let it stick you with one of them.”

“Really? Because the way this date is going, I’m fairly sure that’s what I’ve already done.”

Anger flashed in Caesar’s eyes. “So you’re only here because of the system?”

“I said it was my first time,” Joseph reminded him. “And I told you already that nothing about this is what I expected. For one thing, I thought my first match would be a girl.”

“A girl?” Caesar echoed, the edge in his voice growing sharper. “And what does that make me? A bad surprise?”

“As soon as you opened your mouth, yes!” Joseph replied. 

His date stared pensively at him, his fingers drumming on the tabletop. Joseph could clearly see that he was trying to quell the seething rage that threatened to boil over in him. “Are you even into men?” he finally asked.

“That seems like an odd question to ask when you’re on a date with one.”

“You just said you were expecting a woman.”

“If that’s the way you took it, I’ll elaborate. I’ve never dated a man before, but I’ve always been open to the idea.”

“And what does that make you? Adventurous?”

“I was thinking something more along the lines of  _ bisexual _ , but I haven’t quite worked it out yet.”

“Do you expect me to help you sort that out?”

“If you sign off on the consent form, then maybe-”

“ _ Maybe _ you should consider something,” Caesar stepped in without missing a beat. “I’m not here to experiment. I’d rather know for sure whether or not you’re actually serious. Otherwise, I don’t know why you’d even bother sitting down at this table with me.”

“Listen, I said I’m  _ open to it _ and I’m  _ working it out _ .”

“Maybe you should have done that before you said on your profile that you were interested in men,” Caesar snapped. There was a long, tense silence between them before he spoke again., “Do you even want to be here right now?”

“In general, not really,” Joseph replied.

“So why don’t you just leave?”

Joseph paused, and Caesar’s eyes locked with his. Now that was certainly something to consider. Why didn’t he leave? It would have been easy. It wasn’t like the restaurant had chained him to the table; he could just stand up and walk away if he wanted to do so. And yet, somehow, Caesar seemed to have him rooted firmly to the spot. He was invested in this now, and he couldn’t let it go.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t give up on things so easily,” he finally said.

Caesar scoffed, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t think you realize how fucking predatory you sound right now.”

“Maybe it was intentional,” Joseph went on. “Maybe you should start getting scared, Caesar. I’m on the hunt now. You’re my target.”

At that, the man across from him finally laughed. “You better shape up the way you talk, because right now, you sound like the biggest fuckboy I’ve ever met in my life.”

“So it’s just now that you’re thinking that? You seemed pretty dead-set on accusing me of the exact same thing a few minutes ago.”

Caesar sighed, lifting a hand to run his fingers through his pristine blonde hair. “Here’s some advice, Joseph. Learn to take a joke.”

With that, both their pods chimed in tandem. Joseph lifted his out of his pocket again. “Finally, for fuck’s sake,” he muttered as he looked at the screen. He raised his eyebrows. “Did you get the same thing as I did? Because all I have is an address.”

His date looked at him, his bewildered expression mirroring Joseph’s. “I think so,” he said. “Is yours telling you  _ fifth and sixty-seventh _ ?”

“No venue description,” Joseph replied. “I don’t think it’s an event.”

“There’s only one thing left to do, then,” Caesar remarked. “We find it.”

* * *

The address, as it happened, belonged to a luxe-looking housing complex with a fountain out front. It was around fifteen blocks away from the place that Caesar said he lived, and on the opposite side of the city for Joseph. He stared up at the clean concrete edifice and sighed. “What exactly are we supposed to do here?”

“Go inside, I guess,” was Caesar’s reply. “And find this room.” He held the screen of his pod toward Joseph, displaying the number  _ 19-F _ .

Immediately Joseph sensed a note of suspicion in the whole situation. “Look, if they don’t have some kind of activity for us set up in there or something, this is going to get very awkward, very fast.”

“It’s only going to be awkward if you make it that way,” Caesar said as he went ahead of Joseph and walked through the doors. Joseph sighed and chased after him.

The place wasn’t totally empty, as he had been hoping it wouldn’t be. People were milling about in the lobby and hallways, showing the both of them that yes, this was a place that people lived, and a few delivery boxes and scattered bags of groceries assured him that they didn’t just come here for sleazy short-term interactions. Something told him that little could disappoint Caesar more than cut-rate no-tell motels on a first date.

The room they wandered into was a simple and clean one-bedroom suite with tastefully minimal decoration. Joseph assumed that they were supposed to be personalizable, but with fourteen and a half hours left with Caesar, he figured they wouldn’t have the time for it. Units like these were supposed to house couples in their time together before they were moved back to their single units in between relationships. 

That thought made him pause and look at Caesar. Suddenly he felt as though the two of them didn’t really belong here. Did eighteen hours actually count towards anything? Why did the system find it worth putting them both up in a unit if it was only for a single night?

Caesar, on the other hand, seemed to be busily searching the living space around for any sign of entertainment. He pointed out a bottle of champagne on ice with two glasses by the couch alongside a box of chocolate-covered strawberries. Finding nothing else of note, Caesar ventured on into the bedroom while Joseph looked into the bathroom. 

Upon returning, there wasn’t much to report. “It’s tiled with glass in there, and the window is frosted. It’s really nice,” Joseph remarked. “But I don’t think interior decorating gives us much to do.”

“There’s nothing in the bedroom either,” Caesar responded. “A giant vase and sunflowers, but nothing I didn’t expect.”

The two of them fell silent again, staring at each other across the living room. Joseph felt his heart pounding at his ribs. The height of the wine’s effects had passed, and his nerves were starting to come back to him. His eyes flitted from Caesar’s face to the bottle of champagne, then back. It seemed like both of them knew what was expected of them, but both were reluctant to say it outright.

It was Caesar who broke the stalemate. “We may as well take the free champagne.”

“And the strawberries,” Joseph agreed. “I mean, they set them out for us, so...”

Caesar nodded in agreement, but still, neither of them moved. Joseph’s palms started to sweat the way they had been doing at the beginning of the night. “Well, I think they must have...” he mumbled.

“Yeah,” Caesar said without prompting, as if he’d immediately picked up on what Joseph was going to say. “Yeah. They set everything up so nicely, too.”

Joseph agreed with a silent nod. In that moment, Caesar’s eyes seemed to stare right through him, and he felt horribly exposed. There was something on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to say it. 

Thankfully, Caesar found a way to fill the silence. “Um... i-if you don’t mind, I put a lot of stuff in my hair to style it, and I’d really like a shower right now.”

“Oh, go on ahead. I don’t mind,” Joseph sputtered almost automatically. “I’ll just, er... I’ll be out here. Taking all the chocolates for myself.”

“You’d better leave some for me,” Caesar playfully warned him. He disappeared into the bathroom, and Joseph finally let himself relax for the first time that night.

He rounded the couch and collapsed onto the cushions, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. He hadn’t realized just how imbalanced his entire self had been all evening. He’d been trying not to think about it. Was this just the way it felt to get integrated into the system? If that was the case, he didn’t know how the hell it had gotten so popular. This was awful. He didn’t think he’d ever been more uncomfortable in his life, not even the handful of times that his grandmother had tried to acquaint him with girls at galas and military balls when he was younger. He knew she was still waiting on him to actually settle down and have someone to introduce her to one of these days. 

It was nearly half an hour before Caesar came back from the bathroom. In that time, Joseph had eaten almost a third of the chocolate strawberries and half the bottle of champagne trying to get his buzz back. Caesar didn’t fail to notice, since the table beside the couch was where his eyes immediately gravitated when he emerged. 

Joseph felt a little flush of embarrassment when he finally saw his match again. He’d come out of the bathroom in nothing but a towel- granted, a large one that somehow managed to wrap around his entire body, but still a towel. Nothing under it. Joseph put that out of his mind as he got up from the couch. “I think I’m gonna take a shower as well,” he said without thinking. He didn’t care to mention that he’d taken one right before their date. Caesar didn’t seem to be aware of that, since he merely nodded and shuffled off toward the bedroom.

He didn’t intend to, but Joseph ended up taking nearly as long as Caesar had. Half that time wasn’t even spent doing anything shower-related. Most of it was just agonizing over what was going on in the world around him. He didn’t know what he was doing. Every part of him was starting to regret having gone along with this harebrained idea to let the system take control of his love life. It all felt so forced and awkward, like he was being made to live out a narrative that someone else had written and all his autonomy had been taken away.

But Caesar had told him before that it didn’t have to be like that. So maybe, just for tonight, he didn’t have to do what he was told.

He came out of the bathroom to find Caesar in the exact position he himself had been in before, although he was curled up on the couch with a blanket thrown around his shoulders instead of sprawled out across it, sipping at a champagne glass and staring at the wall. Joseph stalked off to the bedroom without catching his date’s attention. He knew that the system was supposed to move his belongings about whenever he relocated. He figured that this night counted, even if it only was one night. And he was right. The old Clash shirt and sweatpants that served as his pajamas had been neatly packed away into top drawer of the dresser with the giant blue sunflower vase.

Joseph returned to the living room just as quietly as he had left it, and Caesar hadn’t changed his position. Tentatively, he called out to him. “Caesar?”

The man jumped, nearly spilling his champagne onto himself, before settling back down and looking over at Joseph. “Yes?” he said softly.

“Um...” Joseph’s mouth felt dry. He hadn’t had nearly enough champagne to put him at ease again. “Can I join you?”

“Sure.” Caesar scooted back, huddling himself into the corner of the couch. Joseph slunk across the apartment to sit down on the opposite side. He reached for the strawberries and started nibbling on one, if only to give himself something to do. 

They sat in silence for what felt like an eternity. It was like both of them were stalling, though against what Joseph couldn’t be sure. Seeing Caesar up close, Joseph realized that there was something undeniably alluring about him. He seemed ethereal, almost angelic, with his hair still damp and clumped together in messy golden locks. Joseph could have sworn that he’d been wearing makeup before, but now, he saw that it wasn’t true. His skin really was that clear.

“I’ve been wondering something,” Caesar said finally after finishing his glass of champagne. “About what you said. I’m guessing you’re just not into things that are long-term.”

“Sort of,” Joseph replied. “It’s not so much that I objectively don’t want it. I’ve just never met anyone that made me want to take that kind of plunge.”

“Then why become part of the system?”

“It’s... it’s a lot of things,” Joseph replied with a sigh. “I think that having a relationship could be nice, in theory. It seems enjoyable. And I feel like I want to know what that experience is like, at least once in my life.” He paused, letting slip a faint laugh, one which was genuine this time. “And my grandma won’t ever stop bothering me about never telling her what’s going on in my life. But the truth is, nothing in my life is worth telling her. I’ve never felt anything that strongly about anyone. Maybe I just don’t trust myself to make the right decisions about who I want to spend my life with.”

Caesar gazed at him for a long, silent second. “Don’t you think that’s kind of sad?”

“What is?”

“That you’ve never felt anything that strong,” he elaborated. “I think that’s part of what makes us human. Having feelings. Being able to register a passion that strong. It’s what lets us know that we’re still alive.”

“Then I’ve probably goaded you into thinking I’m not human or something,” Joseph said half-jokingly. “Now that’s a plot twist. You’ve been on a date with a robot this whole time.”

Surprisingly, Caesar laughed. “If that’s the case, you’re doing a damn good job of pretending to be human.”

For what felt like the first time that night, Joseph felt an actual, non-nervous smile curl the corners of his lips. “There’s something that should find you a better match than me.”

“What?”

“Your laugh,” he replied. “It’s nice. Whoever you end up with should want to hear it as much as possible.”

For a second, he thought he saw a dusting of redness over Caesar’s cheekbones. He chalked it up to the champagne. “That’s nice of you to say,” his match said.

“So... what about you?”

“What about me?”

“How did you end up here?”

Caesar shifted a little, wrapping his blanket tighter around his shoulders. “It’s, um... It’s nowhere near as interesting as your reason,” he said. “I’m just a busy person. I don’t really have much time for searching people out on my own. Or... I guess I would have time, if I figured out a way to make it. Though that probably makes me sound lazy.”

“You’re not lazy,” Joseph assured him. “You just have priorities.”

“Priorities that have kept me single for as long as I can remember,” his date rephrased. “Maybe I have the same problem as you. I don’t trust myself to find my own matches.”

“So we’re having a supercomputer do it for us. It’s a great direction that the human race is going, isn’t it?”

Caesar laughed again, and Joseph felt warmth pooling in his chest. God, Caesar had such a good laugh. It made him smile every time he heard it.

They kept talking. Joseph wasn’t sure what about. For a while, time seemed to lose all its meaning. Joseph forgot to look at the clock at any point to see how deep in the night it was or check the pods to see how much time they had left. He began to feel drowsy, and he very seriously considered falling asleep on the couch just listening to Caesar talk. He felt like he was getting less and less coherent as the night went on. By the time one of them finally checked their pod, it was only because one of them had caught sight of the sun starting to rise outside the window.

“Shit,” Joseph murmured, looking down at the tiny black screen in his hand.

Caesar raised his head from his blanket. “What is it?”

“We’ve only got six hours left, fuck knows what time it is, and we haven’t slept.”

His date sighed, running his fingers through his hair to rake it back from his forehead. “Shit,” he agreed.

Joseph stretched his arms above his head and stood up. “Well, I’m gonna brush the chocolate off my teeth. You said the bed here is nice.”

“It is. I think the sheets are Egyptian cotton, but I’d have to check the tag to be sure.”

“Egyptian cotton? So you’re a fabric-identifier too?” Joseph teased. “You’re just the man with all the gifts, aren’t you?”

Caesar laughed again, falling back against the arm of the couch and putting his blanket-covered hands over his face. “Fuck off,” he giggled. 

“ _ You _ fuck off,” Joseph tossed back.

“No,  _ you _ fuck off!” Caesar playfully scolded him, smiling. He picked up a throw pillow off the couch and chucked it at him. “Go brush your teeth, you filthy animal.”

Joseph caught the pillow and tossed it back at him. “Fine, fine. But you better do it after I do, because if not, you should know that’s damn disgusting.”

“Just go brush, moron.”

Joseph stuck his tongue out at Caesar and wandered to the bathroom again. A few minutes later, he fell into bed, and he saw the other man’s silhouette make its way into the same place he had just left. He let his eyes fall closed as his body sank into the mattress. It was infinitely softer than the one he had in his single unit. He had a brief thought about how that might be used as a coercive tactic, but he didn’t dwell on it for very long. 

He had just barely started to drift off when he heard the door swing open. “Joseph?”

Joseph rolled over and opened his eyes. Caesar stood in the doorway, leaned against one side, his hip curving out at an angle that immediately read to Joseph as something suggestive. “What is it?” he asked.

“I’ve, uh... I’ve been thinking about something,” Caesar confessed, as he slipped through the doorway. “I know that I may have said some things at dinner that might not have gone over so well with you. And I... I just wanted you to know... If you need someone to, um... to help you figure out what you’re looking for here... if it has to be somebody, I actually wouldn’t mind that person being me.”

Joseph stared at Caesar for a moment, a silhouetted vision in the doorway, and his sleep-fogged brain struggled to process what he’d just been told. “Caesar, are you telling me that... you’re sure you want to?”

As if to answer, Caesar lifted up his pod in the palm of his hand and tapped the tiny black screen. A chime sounded, and Joseph knew instinctively that, were he to go back out to the living room and fetch his own pod, the screen would show him the exact same little white check box waiting for him to sign with a fingertip. Caesar had just signed off on the consent form, and he was waiting for Joseph to do the same.

A sudden feeling of hollowness struck Joseph, and he found himself bowing his head and letting out a defeated sigh. “Caesar, I... I don’t think I could do something like that to you”

“What do you mean?” The question wasn’t angry or vindictive, just gentle and curious. Maybe a little confused, but Joseph only had himself to blame for that.

“You said it yourself,” he explained. “You don’t want to be an experiment. And you shouldn’t be. I don’t want to make you do this just because you think it’s what I want.” He looked up at Caesar again, who tensed when their eyes met. 

“So... you don’t want to?” he asked.  Joseph’s breath caught in his throat, but he still had it in him to shake his head. Once he did, Caesar seemed to relax. “Then do you mind if I sleep in here? The couch isn’t exactly prime real estate.”

“Would you like me to take it, then?”

“If you want to. If it would make you feel better after... after that whole proposition I just gave you. But if you don’t mind this...” He gestured at the bed. “I don’t mind it either.”

A little smile quirked at Joseph’s lips, and he scooted over to one side of the bed, patting the space beside him. Caesar smiled back and gladly dove onto the mattress beside him. He watched the man beside him burrow under the covers and stretch out before curling up like a cat, facing him and closing his eyes.

Joseph wasn’t nearly as graceful putting himself under the covers. He lay still on his back for a while, trying to find sleep. It had been hanging over him like a dark cloud just a few minutes ago, but now, it felt totally out of reach.

Mulling it over in his mind, he rolled over onto his side to look at Caesar. The man beside him seemed to be sleeping peacefully, cozied up with his romanesque nose buried in the edge of the blankets. There was something otherworldly about seeing him like this. Joseph felt like a creep, watching him sleep for no other reason than to stare at his face without him knowing, but at the same time, he couldn’t close his eyes or look away. Something in him just wanted to memorize this image, the same way that a person stares for hours at an impressionist painting. He was mesmerized.

Without warning, Caesar’s eyes opened, and their gazes locked for the thousandth time that night. He felt a thrill of adrenaline race across his nerves, and his face flushed with shame. It was as if Caesar had felt Joseph’s eyes on him. Neither of them said a word, but at that moment, Joseph thought he could hear voices in his head. Eventually, Caesar’s eyes fell closed again, and still Joseph never looked away.

He didn’t sleep, not even as the sun changed positions and Caesar lazily shifted in his sleep. He felt like something in him had suddenly been switched on, and now no matter how he tried, he couldn’t turn it off.

Half an hour before 11 AM, Caesar’s pod began to chirp, loud and obnoxious. He could hear his own pod doing the exact same thing outside. That was their thirty-minute warning, Joseph realized with a jolt. They had to be outside their venue in at least that given time.

Caesar groaned, rolled onto his back and reached for the pod. He looked at the screen, sighed and shut the alarm off. “I guess this is it, then,” he mumbled sleepily.

“I guess it is,” Joseph agreed.

His date sat up in bed and arched his back, rolling his head on his shoulders. “Do you want to get dressed first, or should I?”

“You can go on,” he replied. “I saw a coffeepot in the kitchen. God knows I need some. Do you want me to make you a cup, too?”

Caesar looked over at him and smiled. “That would be lovely.”

Joseph got up and stumbled into the kitchen to put the coffee on. Caesar followed him a few minutes later, and Joseph found himself compelled to look at him as he crossed the apartment and sat down at the kitchen table, idly combing through his hair with his fingers. It occurred to Joseph then that he hadn’t so much as touched Caesar the night before. It was a strange thing to realize. He didn’t think he’d ever gone out of a date without at least a cursory kiss.

The half hour was gone too fast. Before he knew it, the two of them were standing in the lobby, dressed up for another day and watching their pods count down the last few dregs of their time together. Joseph set his down on the bench beside him and focused on pulling his scarf on around his neck instead. It was a brisk autumn day outside, and he knew he only had a few more moments with Caesar anyway. He didn’t want to waste them looking at a screen.

“It’s so strange,” his date remarked.

“What is?” Joseph asked.

“The system. How it all works. It doesn’t make much sense at all, if you think about it. All it really does is throw people into relationships and hope they work out. It’s like throwing noodles at a wall to see if they stick.”

Joseph smirked at him. “Back at it again with the pasta references?”

Caesar laughed and rolled his eyes. “Shut up. One of these days I’m going to catch you using some kind of trite British slang, and I am going to hold that over your head for as long as you live.”

Joseph almost smiled. It was the alarm that stopped him, issuing from both their pods at once. Caesar’s expression fell, and he knew that the same realization had hit him as well.

Reluctantly, Joseph got up from the bench and faced the door. He glanced back at his date over his shoulder. Caesar stayed put, almost like walking out along with him would hurt him somehow. Joseph agreed. Better to cut this off quickly and move on if this was all the time they would have. “Well,” he said. “It’s been lovely. And who knows. Maybe the system will set us up again.”

“Maybe,” Caesar said. He was smiling when Joseph turned away and started toward the door. Then, just as he was leaving, he shouted after him. “Joseph! Wait!”

Joseph paused, trying to turn around, but the revolving door kept pushing him forward. The momentum pulled Caesar in as he sprinted across the lobby after him and he stumbled through the circling door and out onto the pavement. He held his hand out to Joseph, a small white sphere with a black screen resting in his palm.

“You left your pod on the bench, stupid. I don’t think they hand out replacements for these.”

Joseph’s face burned, and he sheepishly took the tiny piece of tech from Caesar’s hand. Caesar’s palm was warm, he observed as his fingers brushed over it. Rough and callused, but warm.

Before Joseph could think about it further, two automated cars pulled up to the curb, and the driver’s side doors silently swung open. It was their cue to part ways. Still, Joseph was hesitant to turn away and leave. He stalled just long enough for Caesar’s hand to find his arm. “Joseph...” he began. “I... Listen I just wanted to...” He shook his head and sighed. “Never mind. You’re not... well, you’re not Italian, so I’m sure you’d take it the wrong way.”

Joseph raised an eyebrow at Caesar. “Take what the wrong way?” he asked.

Caesar stared at him for a tense second. Then he straightened up, stood on his toes and pressed his lips to Joseph’s cheek.

Their eyes met one last time as Caesar pulled away, leaving Joseph stunned and frozen on the sidewalk. “I hope we get matched again sometime,” he said. “I really hope we do.” 

Just like that, he disappeared into the car, the door closed and he was swept away. All that was left for Joseph was for him to do the same. And he did, once he had shaken off the stupor he’d been left in. The car ferried him back to his single unit. Upon arriving, he quickly shelled his clothes off and fell into bed. He passed out almost instantly as if the caffeine in his bloodstream weren’t there at all, the feeling of Caesar’s kiss still lingering on his skin.

 


	2. Wendell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys I'll be 21 by the time this update actually posts and manages to reach you.  
> Happy birthday to me, here's another installment of my weird thoughts put into words and published on the internet.  
> I'm honestly thrilled at the response I got to just my first update? Nobody has ever left that many comments on a first chapter for anything I've written before. Really tells you something about my history on this site. Regardless, I'm here with more of it. I don't know if I should start plugging my tumblr in these author notes, because I do have one, and it's called lord-ravioli. Give me a follow and let me know if I should add a page with links to stuff I've written, or look at my bad art and ask me for commissions. I can't promise that college is leaving me with much time to make those, but it'll just be nice to know that some people out there think the things I make are somehow appreciable.  
> Anyway, it's CONTENT WARNING time, because this is the first chapter where it becomes apparent why this fic is rated M.  
> There's some alcohol and a bit of sex. That's basically it.  
> Thanks again to cicada_s and Jasmine for letting me punch them in the emotions with this story.
> 
> And now for something completely different.

 

That kiss stayed with Joseph for a long while after he woke up from his recovery nap. It remained with him even as he wandered out into the surrounding streets to explore, maybe get something to eat, but most importantly get a feel for the city he’d be living in for as long as the system decided he needed to be there. He tried to remember just how long ago he’d decided to join, or even when he’d decided that would be a good idea in the first place. However, when he tried to focus on that single question, his thoughts seemed to grow foggy and stray off in some direction or another. 

Finally, as evening was beginning to wend its way across the sky, a sharp  _ ping _ issued from his pod. He quickly fished it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. Once it registered that he was paying attention, it spoke. “Your new match is ready to meet you! Be at this address at the specified time.”

Joseph narrowed his eyes for a second as he read over the address- a nightclub lounge, where he was supposed to meet his new mystery match at 8 PM. He had three hours to get ready. “That was fast,” he remarked.

“The system’s goal is to help its users find their perfect match in the most expedient way possible,” the pod frankly replied. 

“I know. I know that, but... I don’t know, this all seems a little sudden. I mean, I just left from another date this morning,” Joseph contested. 

“The system’s goal is to help its users find their perfect match in the most expedient way possible,” went the response, an exact replica of the first one he had gotten. Joseph sighed heavily and shoved the pod back into his pocket. He hadn’t even gotten to spend one night in his single unit and here he was, already at it again. He didn’t know why he had bothered trying to argue with the pod. The system wasn’t made to be debated with.

Joseph promptly returned to his unit to get changed. When he came in, the posters he had purchased during his outing were already up on the wall, exactly where he would have put them himself. He didn’t know who was running this operation, but they were damn efficient. Once he’d dressed himself up to look as good as he could manage, he headed out the door.

Two things stuck with him after the perplexing experience that had been his first date with the system. One, he was not about to be late again. He knew by now that it was an atrocious mood-killer. Two, he didn’t dare let himself be underdressed a second time.

However, when he reached the place the pod had chosen for him, he suddenly felt that the second step hadn’t been quite as necessary as he had thought. It wasn’t anything refined or formal like the place where he and Caesar had met. The lounge was swanky, to be sure, and drinks would probably be expensive, but it wasn’t the sort of place where people showed up in suit jackets. Still, being caught in dress pants and a blazer didn’t deter him. Places like this were, as he’d recalled before, his natural element when it came to flirting.

A muscular man with flaxen hair walked through the doors of the place at almost the exact same time he did. His shoulder nudged against Joseph’s as he passed, and right then both of their pods let out an alarming chirp. He spun around, his eyes wide, and faced Joseph. The appearance of the man was a little alarming. For one thing, Joseph had yet to meet anyone in the system who was taller than him.

“Hey,” the stranger said with an unmistakably American accent. “You wouldn’t happen to be here meeting someone at eight, would you?”

“Would it scare you if I said yes, and that the notification reached me at five?” Joseph coyly responded.

The man in front of him laughed. “Damn. I guess there’s just one thing left to do, then,” he said. He surfaced his pod from his pocket. “Is the guy that I’m looking at the one I’m here for?” he asked it.

“Yes,” the gadget replied. “Your meeting at eight PM has commenced.”

“Wow,” Joseph remarked. “I can’t believe I was actually right on time for this one. And that I found the right person on the first try.”

“What, have you lost track of your date before?” the man inquired with a smile that revealed perfect, pearl-white teeth. 

“Only once.” Joseph smiled back at him, the expression feeling compulsory. “I’m new here. You’re actually only my second date.”

“Really?” His date seemed intrigued by the idea of that. “Welcome to the system, then. I’m glad you’re off to such a good start. Maybe what you need is for someone to show you the ropes a little.”

“You think so?”

“Well, you never learn anything if nobody bothers to teach you.”

“And how many relationships have you been in, if I may ask?”

“If I’m counting right, you’re my ninth.”

Joseph’s eyes widened and he blushed. “Oh. Um.. I, er, I didn’t realize.” For someone who hadn’t been a virgin for several years, he had never felt more like one in his life.

“Whoa. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Everyone has to start somewhere,” his date said, settling a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “My name’s Wendell, by the way.”

With the ice now broken, Joseph finally let himself relax. “I’m Joseph.”

After they found their table, Wendell began going through the motions of starting a relationship in the system, at least as well as he knew them. First, according to him, a couple always had to check their deadline.

“Is it okay if we count down before we swipe it open?” Joseph asked. “I feel like that builds anticipation. Makes it more fun. That, and we can both do it at once.”

Wendell smiled at him again. Joseph realized he probably sounded childish, but at least his new date was taking it well. “Sure. You want to count?”

He nodded, and they both poised their fingers over their pods at the same time. “Three, two, one.”

_ 2 weeks. _

Joseph was strangely relieved when he saw the result. He was sure that he wouldn’t have been this comforted by it before, but after his first relationship getting broken off so fast, he had been left longing for something. He wasn’t sure what. All he knew now was how glad he felt that this time it wouldn’t all be ending after only a few hours.

“Alright. Two weeks,” Wendell read aloud. “That’s a decent amount of time for a second. Not a moment and not an eternity. Makes me wonder what your first was like.”

“Eighteen hours,” was Joseph’s simple reply. “And it just ended earlier today.”

Wendell sighed, a sympathetic look about his face. “Wow. That’s really no time at all.”

* * *

Drinks, as it so happened, weren’t expensive at all in the lounge, since everything that night would be provided by the system. All Joseph and Wendell had to do was make their selections- the system had given them both a limit of three- and wait for the waiter to bring them out. Joseph tried to stay on the higher-proof side of the menu; if he only had three possible drinks to choose, he wanted to make the most of them. Wendell seemed much more laid-back than Caesar was, but the nerves of a blind date were there all the same.

The night wore on pleasantly. Wendell made some engaging conversation, and Joseph felt at ease talking to him. They flirted, teased and laughed, and once they were drunk enough, Wendell let Joseph pull him out to the dance floor. His date seemed calm in their situation, more than likely from having been paired so many times already. His confidence made Joseph feel safe around him. Wendell never disclosed his age, but Joseph suspected that his date was slightly ahead of him in years. That was a comfort as well; Joseph felt he needed someone with a little experience to show him how to go about things, especially now. 

Their pods didn’t go off again until it was nearly two in the morning. By then, Joseph had used up every last one of his free drinks, and so had Wendell. Their allowances had run out hours ago. Wendell looked down at the address on his screen and sighed. “It looks like we’ve finally been assigned a living space.”

“Then I guess it’s about time we call it a night,” Joseph said, a smirk on his lips. “Unless you’d rather keep on grinding. I wouldn’t mind if you did.”

“I don’t really think we have a choice,” his date said. “I mean, we’re out of free passes for food and drinks. If we stay here any longer, they’ll probably start charging us for the space we’re taking up.”

Joseph pursed his lips and sighed. “Okay. Fair enough. I could probably do a lot more than just dancing with you in our new apartment anyway.”

Wendell laughed a little at that. So he liked being teased. That was a plus. “A naughty one, you are. Let’s take us home and see where this goes, eh?”

“I’d be glad to,” Joseph replied.

They took a bus to their new apartment, and Joseph leaned heavily against Wendell’s shoulder as they rolled along. He had lost the languid feeling that his drinks had given him quite some time ago. Still, he wanted to be sure of just how drunk he was. He lifted the pod from his pocket and put it to his lips, exhaling into the small microphone that circled the edge. As he did, the screen softly flashed green. Just as he’d suspected, he was sober once again.

Apparently, Wendell hadn’t failed to notice what he was up to. “Testing yourself?” 

“Yeah,” Joseph replied. “I just wanted to make sure. The system won’t let you sign off on the consent form if you don’t pass.”

“Already talking about the consent form?” Wendell mused. “I kind of did take you to be an eager one. You’re in luck.” He smirked. “I kind of like that in the people I match with.”

“Good. Then we might actually work well for a whole two weeks.” 

“You know, I’ve been wondering about something.”

As soon as he said that, Joseph compulsively began to feel nervous. “What’s that?”

“I didn’t know whether or not I should bring this up now, because it’s totally broken a few of my matches in the past, but I feel like I should be honest about this as soon as I can be. I, uh... I just hope you don’t mind that I’m not exclusively into men.”

A wave of relief hit Joseph. “I’m not either,” he confessed.

Wendell turned to him, looking surprised. “No?”

“No,” Joseph assured him. “I’ve actually never, uh...”

“Never slept with a man before?” Wendell finished for him, to which Joseph shamefully nodded. “Hey, no worries. A lot of people start out that way. The system’s supposed to help you sort shit out, right?”

Joseph smiled softly at him. “I didn’t think you’d take it so well.”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Wendell assured him. “I’d be happy to help you out with it.”

“You would?” The question was out before Joseph could stop himself, and as he heard himself verbalize it, he realized he sounded far too excited.

“Yeah,” Wendell casually replied. The bus reached their stop not long after, and the two of them stepped out onto the street.

The new complex was almost identical to the first one Joseph had seen, only a few stories taller. The couple’s unit inside looked much the same as the first one had. The shower in the bathroom was about half the size, but this one had a bathtub to accompany it. There were no flowers in the bedroom, but the campy old sci-fi poster that Joseph had bought was pinned up on the wall by the bed, just as he’d placed it in his single unit. Across from it was an abstract painting that he’d never seen before. After Joseph was done exploring, he returned to the living room to find Wendell sitting on the couch, patiently waiting for him. It looked like he’d sat down there as soon as they had arrived and hadn’t moved.

Joseph slunk into the living room and stood across from Wendell, who got up off the couch as soon as they were in each other’s line of sight. “You wanted to talk?” he asked.

“Of course,” Wendell replied. “You see... generally, in my experience, I find it’s best to get into sex as soon as possible. It’s one of the basest things you can understand about your partner, and I think that you can learn a lot about a person that way. Sometimes it can even be a deciding factor on whether or not a relationship can work.”

Joseph nodded and hummed in acknowledgement. Then he took his pod in his hand and checked off the consent form without a second thought. He looked up at Wendell and grinned. “I’m willing if you are.”

His match laughed, and Joseph noted an odd hitch in his voice when he did. “Alright, then.” He took out his pod, passed the breath test and checked his own form as well. “What do you want me to do for you?”

Joseph shrugged. “I don’t know. I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”

“Oh, so you’re not a domineering type. Hm... I could undress myself first,” Wendell offered with a coy smile. “Take a good look at me and decide if you like what you see.”

With his silky hair and deep brown eyes, Joseph couldn’t imagine that Wendell could be hiding anything he  _ wouldn’t _ like, but he let his date go through with it anyway. He watched intently as Wendell slowly shrugged his jacket off and let it hit the floor, then eased his fingers under the hem of his shirt and lifted it over his head. He turned a little, stretching out his arms and shaking his hair loose as it came free of the collar, then looked at Joseph over his shoulder. His match had the most intense fuck-me stare that he had ever seen.

Immediately, something changed. Joseph felt a sudden drop in his insides, heat rising in his chest, a bolt of electricity slithering down his spine and striking him right between his legs. There it was, the old sensation that had made him question if he was destined to be chasing after girls his whole life, or if he might be after something else as well. 

He knew the answer now. He definitely wanted something more than what a single side of the fence had to offer.

He watched hungrily as Wendell shed the rest of his clothes. Only then did Joseph approach him, take him by the wrists and place his match’s hands on his waist. “Do that to me,” he begged. “Please.”

Wendell complied. Joseph felt another thrill as his clothes slid off of him and Wendell ran his soft hands along the lines of his body. He watched his date stand up again and roughly kick his clothes away from their feet. Wendell’s hands came up again to hold his face. Their lips brushed, and Joseph’s reaction was instant. 

He wasted no time in pushing Wendell backwards onto the couch and climbing on top of him.

* * *

The next morning was slow, as expected. Wendell had been gentle and providing, as Joseph had hoped he would be for his first time. He’d tried a handful of new things, and after waking up felt an intense ache in his ass that left him barely able to walk. Wendell was sweet about it, though. He said that Joseph was an even better lay than he was at dancing. Joseph jokingly took that as an insult to his dancing skills. Wendell then made eggs and bacon for the both of them, and the first few days of their relationship went in a fairly similar manner. 

Wendell was sweet and unbelievably thoughtful. He was very invested in knowing as much about Joseph as he could, so much so that Joseph himself couldn’t help feeling a little inadequate. He felt odd being that forward. It didn’t help much that Wendell had laughed the first time he had seen the poster that Joseph had hung up in the bedroom, and not for the same reasons Joseph would have. Joseph had at least been nice enough to keep his mouth shut about the abstract expressionist art, which Wendell had explained were copies of works by Rothko, whoever that was, and which had a historical significance that he appeared to be very passionate about. Joseph didn’t see the point of it, since they were basically just big smears of color over a canvas. After nine days, he finally said it out loud to Wendell, who pretended that he appreciated the honesty, but Joseph could tell that he was hurt. They didn’t speak much for the rest of the evening.

It only went downhill from there. As nice as Wendell had been at first, it wore thin quickly, and Joseph started to feel glad that he was only stuck with him for two weeks. His second match got attached far too fast. He kept after Joseph a little too closely, and the he was doting to the point where it got suffocating. Then there were the interests and passions he obsessed over a little too much and the moments where he got long-winded; Joseph didn’t mind listening, but what irked him was the fact that Wendell couldn’t stand being interrupted, even for small responses and reactions to show him that Joseph was actually paying attention.

When the two weeks were finally over, both of them seemed relieved. They didn’t hug it out or kiss each other goodbye when the automated cars came to drive them back to their single units. The feeling of him didn’t stay with Joseph any longer than it had to.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it was short, but it had to happen. I hope you found it at least substantial enough to last you until next week.  
> I'll go ahead and warn you now that the story is REALLY going to get its shit together in the next bit. You'll understand what I mean when I actually post it.
> 
> See you next chapter.


	3. Suzie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lived, bitch.  
> I'm frankly shocked that I've been able to stick to this schedule of weekly updates. I always fall behind on these kinds of things. Then again, this is just the beginning, and I've got many more chapters ahead of this. I'll apologize again for the last chapter being so short. If you haven't sorted it out already, I've decided to go with titling each chapter based on Joseph's matches, so the length of each one varies greatly based on how long and how interesting each relationship gets.   
> And, like I warned in the ending note of my last chapter, finally this story is taking off and going somewhere. You'll understand it more as we move along, I suppose.  
> Thanks again to my betas for validating my feelings while I wrote this story.   
> A handful of CONTENT WARNINGS for this one. More sex, alcohol mention, and mention of someone's unhealthy history with their sex life and SOME MILD BIPHOBIA.   
> Have fun.

Joseph was matched again the very next day. It still felt too fast, but Joseph wasn’t in any place to complain about it. He was caught in the middle of buying more decorations for his single unit and told suddenly to go to a little waterfront cafe by the river that ran through the middle of the city, where apparently his next match would be waiting for him by 2 PM.

When he arrived, he found the place to be quaint, clean and modern, a polished little coffeeshop with an interior based entirely on a blue and white color scheme. He wasn’t sure what to make of it until he took his instructional pod out of his pocket and asked it, “Who exactly am I supposed to be meeting here?”

As if on cue, someone else’s pod issued a chime loud enough to be heard from the sidewalk outside. A blonde woman sitting at a table near the window reached into a bag that hung from her shoulder and dug her pod out to read its screen. Joseph watched her intently, and a second later, she had raised her head and seen him standing outside. She smiled at him and waved.

Joseph made his way in and joined her. His latest match was a lady of average height but a small build; her pinched waist might have been from her high-waisted shorts, or maybe she was naturally shaped like that. It was hard to tell. She seemed cheerful and chipper, pixie-faced with big, inquisitive blue eyes that stared up at him with unrestrained curiosity.

The first thing she said upon seeing him was, “Sweet Jesus, you’re tall.”

Joseph laughed a little and raised an eyebrow at her. “Thanks, I think,” he said. “Is that something you say to everyone?”

“Not everyone. But you, definitely,” she replied. “Hi. I’m Suzie.” She held her hand out to him, and he gladly  shook it before sitting down. It seemed a weird way to go about things, shaking hands with his match like this was some kind of business deal, but at least she seemed enthusiastic. 

“I’m Joseph. Um... I guess we should be getting technical business out of the way before anything else.”

Suzie nodded and picked her pod up again. “Are you new here?”

“You’re my third date, actually,” Joseph specified as his actions mirrored hers.

“Weird!” Suzie remarked. “You’re mine too.”

They counted down, and their pods spelled out their fate for them. Starting then, they had 3 months to spend together. With that in mind, Joseph made a mental note that he could take his time getting to know the stranger in front of him.

While they talked, Suzie sipped delicately at a mug of hot chocolate, which she told him was her favorite thing to drink, regardless of the weather. He noticed that she had a faint transatlantic accent in her voice, as well as lightly rolling her R's, all adding up to a manner of speaking that he couldn’t quite place. Just taking in her appearance, from the polka-dot blouse to her chunky vintage earrings and the barrette with a big artificial rose that kept her hair pulled back from her face, he easily guessed that she was the reason their date had been scheduled here, at this time. Suzie frequented this cafe, stopping by religiously at least once every week. After ordering what might have been the greatest house-blend earl grey and scones that he had ever tasted in his life, Joseph decided that he’d make a habit of visiting the place as well.

“So... I’m your third date in the system, right?” Suzie said out of the blue about three hours into their date. They had been requested to leave the cafe and had since relocated to a little sculpture garden a few blocks away which Suzie had wanted to show him. 

“You are,” Joseph affirmed. 

“I hope you don’t think it’s weird of me, but is it okay for us to talk about things we’ve done before?” She paused, seeing the bemused look on Joseph’s face. “People we’ve met, that kind of thing.”

“Just people we’ve met?” Joseph teased. “For a second there, I could have sworn you were about to ask me how kinky I am.”

“We could open that up too, if you’re interested,” she giggled, a faint blush rising to her cheeks. “But I think starting with people might be easier.”

Joseph was more than happy to indulge her. “Don’t panic when I say this, but my first two matches were men.”

Suzie cocked her head at him. “Why would that make me panic?”

Briefly, Joseph felt just as lost by what she’d said as she was with him. It took a second for everything to click into place. “Oh. Um... I-it’s just... well, the first one I was with got a bit chuffed when I said I’d never dated a man before, and I was afraid there might be some kind of issue with... you know... the same feeling, but in reverse.”

As he spoke, Suzie’s face fell, and she took on a tired, knowing expression. “Oh, I know. Way too well.” 

“Wait. Are you-”

“Yep.” Suzie didn’t even wait for him to finish. “I’ll be honest, it’s far more common here than you think. The system is supposed to help you figure yourself out, isn’t it?”

Joseph nodded in agreement. “So I’ve been told.”

They kept walking. Suzie prattled on about some collections she’d been building up in her single unit, warning him about all the clutter that would definitely be in their couple’s unit when they were assigned one. Apparently she had been here considerably longer than Joseph, but her matches had been few and far between, all lasting about the same amount of time that theirs was determined to last.

“I didn’t realize that the system could sanction people spending time alone,” Joseph said once she’d explained it all.

“I didn’t either,” Suzie replied. “Not until it happened to me, anyway.”

Their pods scheduled dinner for them, then drinks at a little speakeasy bar in a hotel basement. When they finally got back to their apartment, neither of them could pass the breath test, so the consent forms went unsigned. That wasn’t going to be an issue, they mutually decided. They had three months to get acquainted, so whatever was destined to happen between them could wait. They both then passed out in a pile on the bed.

* * *

The consent forms didn’t remain unsigned for much longer. Three days into their relationship, Joseph caught Suzie in the bathroom going at herself with a vibrator, and it didn’t take long at all for them to both sign off and let themselves go. As it turned out, Suzie’s waist actually  _ was _ that small, and in spite of her Barbie-doll body, she had the stamina of a fucking antelope. By the time she finally tired herself out, Joseph felt like he’d melted into a puddle of slime and been absorbed into the mattress.

Suzie reclined next to him, a cup of hot chocolate cradled in her hands as she stared out the window at the setting sun. “I’m glad they gave us a unit with this view,” she said softly. “I know it’s not healthy to stare at the sun, but for some reason it doesn’t hurt my eyes in here.”

“If you know it’s bad, then why do you do it?” Joseph asked. He barely had enough energy in him to turn his head towards her, but he still managed it. When he saw her face, though, he found her expression was blank.

“Maybe I’m just not good at listening to directions.” She paused to take a sip from her drink. “I’ve been told before that I have that problem. People have to tell me things over and over before I actually manage to keep them in my head.”

Joseph might have been overtired, but it was hard to miss the gloomy note in her voice. It didn’t seem right, coming from her. It felt like a huge step back from everything she had been up to that point. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No,” Suzie replied a little too quickly. She stayed quiet a while longer, and the sun sunk lower on the horizon. Suddenly she took her eyes away from the window and fixed her gaze on him. “We’re still going to talk after this, right?”

“What?” Joseph finally gathered his strength and rolled over, leaning up against the pillows to face her. “Of course we are. We have two months and three weeks more before we get separated.”

“No, I don’t just mean living and interacting, I mean... You know what I mean. I think we’ve had some actual decent conversations. I want to keep doing that.”

“Suzie, we’re still going to talk. I don’t know why you would think that...” Joseph trailed off and shook his head. “Do you think we went into this too fast? Because if we did, I’m sorry. It was just that you were frustrated, and I was starting to get that way too, and we both signed off on it, but it doesn’t have to stay that way if-”

“Know what? Never mind,” Suzie abruptly cut in, looking away from him again. “I’m just being weird. I hope you get used to it.”

All things considered, Joseph probably could, but he didn’t feel entirely right about it. He gently placed a hand on her knee. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Suzie sighed and set her hot chocolate down on the bedside table. “You said you joined because you wanted to get matched up with someone you felt a real connection with. You were tired of the guesswork and needed help sorting it out.”

Joseph nodded. “I don’t see what that has to do with this. Are you going to be upset if my final match doesn’t turn out to be you?”

“Not really. I mean, I’d be surprised if it was me. It’s never been me before.”

Her words only served to confuse Joseph further. “What do you mean?”

“You joined the system to get away from the guesswork. I joined the system to get away from all the threesome offers.”

Joseph’s jaw dropped and he was once again thrown for a loop. “Threesome offers?”

“It’s exactly what it sounds like. Every time I think I’ve met someone nice, that’s what it turns into,” Suzie bitterly clarified. “I’ve never been kept around longer than I was needed. I’ve always kind of been... I don’t know, an accessory. I’ve never been a real part of anything.”

“So you just get left on the side?” Joseph asked, realizing it was a stupid question, since Suzie had already give him an answer, but asking it anyway. “Why would anyone do that to you?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s because they think I’m a novelty or something. Just not one valuable enough to keep around.” She picked up her hot chocolate and took a long, angry sip like it was a drag from a cigarette. “Apparently the only thing a lady like me is good for is spicing up other couples’ stagnating sex lives. I’d get approached by someone, and I start thinking that I’m going to finally get involved with them, but as soon as something they find out about who and what I am, suddenly I’m getting invited to come along with him and his wife, or her and her boyfriend or whoever the fuck, and when it’s over, they say  _ we’ll call you _ and  _ come see us again _ , but they never do, and I never do, and everything will be disappointing for a while until someone else shows up and does it to me again.”

“Again?”

“It had to happen  _ a lot _ of times before I started seeing the pattern.” She took another swig of chocolate. “They must look at me and think,  _ Nice, here’s a stupid blonde girl, and she swings more than one way, that must mean she’ll willingly fuck anything that moves _ .”

“You’re not stupid.”

“You barely know me.”

Joseph took that as his cue to shut up. It seemed pretty obvious that nothing he could say would put Suzie right. He waited patiently while she finished her hot chocolate, then she sank down in the pillows and cuddled up next to him, laying her head on his chest. For a short while, things were silent. 

Finally, Suzie spoke up again. “Is it kind of fucked up?” she asked. “I joined the system so people would stop using me as a side piece. In here there are no side pieces, and you don’t have a choice about leaving whenever you want.”

Joseph didn’t think things were nearly that rigid, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “I don’t think it is. You were tired. You just wanted to be treated like a person for once.”

“And you don’t think any of it was my fault?”

“Definitely not.”

They remained quiet as they both watched the sun go down. After the room had gone dark, Joseph felt a weight lifted off of his chest. He turned to Suzie and asked, “What are you thinking about?”

She looked up at him in turn and said, “Now that I brought it up, I can’t stop thinking about all those people I’ve gotten stuck between. It wasn’t all bad, really. I liked it while it was happening. It was just the leaving that I couldn’t stand.”

Joseph nodded. “I can imagine. That’s always the hardest part of anything.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Promise me you won’t be annoyed.”

Suzie nodded. “I promise.”

“Do you remember my first match that I told you about?”

“The one who doesn’t know what a bisexual is?”

He snorted as he held back laughter. “H-he knew what I was, I just... I didn’t explain it well, I guess. I’m just thinking about what happened back then. It was all very odd.”

“Was it?”

“I think so. I mean... the point of this system is to throw you into close contact with as many people as it possibly can until one works out, right? So, naturally, it probably expects you to try everything you can think of with a person before you reach your deadline.”

Suzie smirked at him. “Are we about to have that discussion about how kinky you are?”

“N-no,” Joseph stammered, struggling not to laugh again. “I, uh... I actually didn’t do anything with him. I didn’t even touch him until we said goodbye.”

“Do you regret holding out on him, then?” Suzie asked. “Do you wish you’d done something with him while you had the time?”

“I, uh.... I’m not sure, actually,” Joseph confessed. “I don’t know if it’s the mystique that keeps him hanging over me or anything like that. Maybe if I had just gone for him that night, I wouldn’t be thinking back on it so much.”

Suzie nodded in solemn agreement. “It’s always the things we’ll never have that are the greatest. They never get the chance to disappoint us.”

Joseph didn’t want to agree with her. He liked to live in the moment, he wanted to say. He tried to find something worthwhile in whatever he had at present, that there was something good in every part of life, he just had to look for it and appreciate it as much as he could as long as it was there.

He wished he didn’t know that she was right.

* * *

Suzie didn’t have much to say about her exes, in spite of the fact that she had been the one to bring it up. Before the system, as she’d told him many times, it had been nothing but fling-seeking couples, which never failed to leave her lonely and mind-numbingly bored. The last two matches she’d had didn’t change much. No women had crossed her path yet; so far she’d only been paired up with two men, both of whom had a hard time exercising restraint and not constantly prying into her sexual history. Joseph asked her once if she was ever lonely or bored with him around. She’d laughed and said no. 

Joseph didn’t feel bored or lonely with Suzie either. They’d plunged into their relationship in the span of only a few days, but it seemed like really knowing Suzie would take considerably more time than that. Suzie, as Joseph came to understand her, was the closest thing to a manic pixie dream girl that he’d ever seen. She was funny, cutesy, obsessed with  antiques and consignment shops, and, true to her archetype, had a record collection that she played often when they were at home in their unit. She thought it was cute that Joseph sometimes borrowed her makeup and chunky vintage jewelry, and she even liked to ask him to do her makeup and put together outfits for her because, as she put it, he was always willing to be bold and dramatic in ways that she couldn’t have thought of on her own. It was an even exchange, since she had a proclivity for stealing random articles of his clothing at times. The flexibility they shared was probably what he appreciated most about her, he figured.

It might have just been the fact that he wasn’t being rapidly thrown from one relationship into another, but when Joseph was with Suzie, time seemed to pass in a steadier fashion. She was cheerful and positive and forgot things a lot, but always took being reminded and corrected in stride. More than anything, Suzie was comforting. Joseph found something constant in her. When he told Suzie two and a half months into their relationship, she said that she felt the same way about him.

Maybe that was what caused the initial sparks of romantic intrigue to settle down into a low-burning ember two weeks before their deadline. He could tell that Suzie was feeling it too. He couldn’t quite place why. It wasn’t that he had gotten tired of her, because he certainly hadn’t; if anything, he just got needier towards her the closer they got to being forced to part ways again. But something was getting in the way. It could have been how crass and casual she was with him all the time, how when she flirted and teased him it seemed more like an inside joke than an attempt at seduction, how sex between them started to feel like a necessity, just another fun activity for them to occupy their time together. Eventually, Joseph got the courage to bring it up.

“I’m glad you’re trying to put it into words,” Suzie replied. “Because there’s no way in hell that I can properly explain it.”

They were back in the cafe where they’d gone for their first date. Joseph had ordered the tea again, and Suzie had her hot chocolate. Hardly a day had passed by that he hadn’t seen her drinking it.

“I just don’t know what to say about it,” Joseph said, staring at the table and lightly shaking his head. “Looking at it all, it doesn’t make sense. I mean, I like you a lot. You’re fantastic. But something just... something feels like it’s missing.”

“Do you want me to try using a strap-on with you or something?”

It was everything Joseph could do not to snort-laugh in the middle of the cafe. “You’re not helping, Suzie,” he said, just barely able to stay serious.

“Alright. But it’s not completely off the table?”

“One thing at a time, Suze,” he said. “It’s just... this has been bothering me for days now. It isn’t just me, right?”

“No. It’s me, too,” Suzie frankly replied. “I think it might be that the two of us work  _ too _ well together. It doesn’t sound right, because usually it’s the opposite isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But I see what you’re getting at. I think that’s what it was. We just kept bouncing off of each other more and more, and now everything we do is just one imitating what the other would say or do.”

Suzie giggled a little. “We’ve been together so much, we’ve become the same person.”

“Do you think it’s the system doing this to us? Because, to be honest, other than dating, I’m not totally sure what else I’ve been doing all the time that I’ve been here.”

At that, his match cocked her head and stared intently at him. He’d gotten her thinking. “Dear god, you’re right. I really don’t know. I guess we’ve just been given a break from everything else in our lives to focus on this one thing.”

“But life is never just one thing, is it?” Joseph added. “There’s more to it than just dating. Like... like whatever happened with the two of us. I don’t really know what to call it. It’s not bad, not at all, but it just feels so... singular.”

“You know what I think?” Suzie offered up suddenly. “You’ve started to feel like a favorite sweater.” Joseph stared at her. Somehow that made sense to him, but at the same time, not entirely. Suzie picked up on that and elaborated. “You’re comforting. Your presence is normal, and it’s become expected. But that’s just what the problem is, really. It’s not a feeling that everyone wants to have forever.”

It took a moment for everything to settle in, then Joseph nodded. “You are so right.”

“I’m doing my best to be,” Suzie said, punctuating with a sip of hot chocolate. They meditated for a moment longer before she spoke again. “In the real world, would this be the point at which one of us says that we need to break up?”

“God, I hope not,” Joseph said. “It seems like such a stupid thing to break up over. It’s not inherently a thing that should be a problem. It’s just a situation that requires more options than the ones we’re being given right now.”

Suzie nodded in agreement. She held Joseph’s hand while they wandered around the city all through the afternoon. They didn’t talk much further about the conversation they’d had, though Joseph could hardly stop thinking about it. Suzie had gotten him into the habit of imagining an endless array of what-ifs, something he’d already been doing for far too long. He tried to ignore it. He didn’t want to be distant from Suzie in their last days together. She deserved better than that.

But eventually, the last days did come. The two of them stayed up all night after their last day together, then cooked breakfast and stayed bundled up on the couch, just talking and clinging to each other before their pod alarms went off and they were summoned outside. Joseph kissed Suzie on her forehead, and she wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him tight in return.

“Maybe I’ll see you again sometime,” Joseph said as he opened the door of his automated car. “They can’t keep us apart forever.”

Suzie laughed. “You won’t see me, Jojo, but I’ll see you. I’ll definitely be seeing you.”

He laughed, and Suzie blew a kiss to him as she climbed into the car and shut the door behind her. She tipped her fingers to her forehead in a little salute through the window, one which he returned. Then the vehicle sped away and she was gone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is.  
> It's time for me to go to Sleepytime Junction.   
> See you next chapter.


	4. Colette

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amidst the hellstorm that is my life, I have this story with which I can seek validation from strangers on the internet.  
> I hope you nerds enjoyed the last chapter, because now we're in some shit, and it requires content warnings. So.......  
> CONTENT WARNING.  
> This chapter contains an ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP, involving VERBAL, EMOTIONAL and MINOR PHYSICAL ABUSE. As well as further alcohol use and sexual material that's a tad more explicit than anything we've seen before. I should also bring up that there's some REALLY UNSUBTLE SEXISM AND HOMOPHOBIA as well as a dig at 50 Shades of Grey. So... fair warning. This chapter also contains maybe the most uncomfortable sex scene I've ever written. I swear, you will never be drier than you will be while you read this chapter.  
> I want to thank cicada_s and my babe Jasmine All Over Again for supporting me through the 7 months it took me to write this monster. Also it's time to plug my tumblr again. That's lord-ravioli (or sexualseapunk if you're the type who enjoys my weirder shit. this story, for all it's worth, is really on the tame side).  
> If you didn't catch my CONTENT WARNING yet, glance up above for that.  
> Alright, now that you've been sufficiently warned, have fun.

 

Joseph barely had time to process Suzie’s absence; before he knew it he was being matched again within only a few hours of their separation. He was supposed to be at a restaurant in midtown by six that evening. He hadn’t been notified that his single unit was ready for him to revisit yet, and when he heard his pod alert him of his new match, he was still in the shirt, flannel and jeans that he’d started the day in. He knew by then that restaurant dates more often than not required some degree of class. He’d be going in underdressed, but that wasn’t a situation that was at all foreign to him. In fact, he was beginning to think that it might be good luck.

He showed up on time to a place he’d never been before, though it probably bought its decorations from the same place that the site of his first date did. He walked in and saw a young woman in a purple pencil-skirted dress standing by the hostess’s podium. She was asking for directions to table 27, which was the same table number that was displayed on the screen of Joseph’s pod.

Trying to be playful, he crept up behind the woman and gently tapped her on the shoulder. She spun around and faced him, her grey eyes fixating on him from behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. “I can’t right now,” she said tersely before he had even opened his mouth. “I’m here on a date.”

Joseph laughed nervously, a bit taken aback. He held up his pod to her, displaying the screen. “Funny thing, I think we’re going to the same place.”

The woman fixated on the screen for a moment, like she needed to read it a few times over just to be sure it was correct. She then raised her gaze to Joseph’s face, seemingly appraising him. “Oh,” she mumbled. “I suppose we are.”

The hostess led them to their table, and Joseph’s date laid the fabric napkin out in her lap before primly folding her hands on the table. “Well,” she said, “this is certainly one way to start a relationship.”

“I think it’s the only way, really, as long as we’re in the system,” Joseph joked in reply.

His match didn’t quite seem to get it. She tilted her head and sighed. “Not in my experience. You must be new here.”

“What makes you say something like that?”

“You’re a bit underdressed, dear.”

Joseph’s face flushed with embarrassment. “Oh. That. Uh... I can explain. You see... I got matched kind of suddenly. I’d just reached my deadline with someone else earlier today, and-”

The woman dismissed the rest of his sentence with a wave of her hand. “No, no, it’s fine. I don’t need to hear your life story. It’s only our first date.”

That only served to deepen Joseph’s embarrassment, and he sheepishly averted his eyes. “Sorry. Must be force of habit or something. It would probably help more to know my name first,” he said, another nervous laugh bubbling up from his chest. “I’m Joseph.”

His date gave him a slight, close-lipped smile. “I’m Colette,” she replied. “Shall we check our deadline, Joseph?”

He nodded, feeling a bit relieved. He knew it was necessary, but he hated bringing it up and was glad that she had done it first. “Yes. Of course,” he affirmed, fishing his pod out of his pocket. “Very procedural of you.”

“In the system, we kind of have to be,” Colette said as she balanced her pod in her palm. “If we don’t follow the directions, the algorithm gets thrown off and then matches aren’t as accurate as they’re supposed to be. Now, on my count. One, two, three.”

Joseph could barely keep up as they both swiped across their screens at the same time. He was, to say the least, a little surprised by the reading he got. 

_ 1.5 years. _

Colette seemed to feel the same, as she raised her eyebrows when she saw the result. “Well, then,” she remarked. “I suppose this will give us a decent bit of time to get to know each other.”

“Since you picked me as a new kid on the block, I’m guessing you must have a track record here of some kind,” Joseph ventured. “What’s it been like up to now?”

“Quite average, I’d say,” she replied. “Three of my last five were around this length. Some were a little longer, some a little shorter, but they’re all in the same estimate.”

“Your last five?” he noted. “So that makes me your sixth?”

Colette nodded. “And what does this make me? Your second? Third?”

“Fourth, actually. Though I haven’t been part of the system nearly as long as you have.”

His words seemed to take Colette off guard, but she didn’t change her composure. “Have you ever had a match that lasted this long before?” Joseph shook his head, and a faint light of excitement came to life in Colette’s eyes. “Oh, my. So this is going to be your first real relationship with the system.”

“ _ Real _ relationship?” Joseph wondered out loud. He wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that. As far as he knew, every match in the system was a real one. His time with Suzie and Wendell definitely felt real to him.

“You know what I mean. A trial for an actual relationship. Not just one of the little test-runs it likes to put together sometimes. I know a lot of people enjoy that sort of short-term thing, but I’ve never gotten much out of it. I put it in my special requests when I first signed up.”

“You seem to know yourself very well,” Joseph remarked. “Honestly, I don’t remember if I put any special requests in at all. I just signed up for the system and hoped for the best, since that’s what it’s all about, you know? It’s a chance you take, just like anything else.”

Colette watched him for a second, as if she expected him to say more, then lowered her gaze and picked up a menu from the table. “If that’s the way you’d like to see it,” she said.

* * *

Dinner went on in what Joseph figured was an average fashion. Colette seemed to be a big fan of small talk, and he was willing to indulge her, if that was what made her comfortable. She ordered a salad for dinner and picked off of his plate, which he found kind of cute, if a little bit trite. Their pods directed them to a patisserie a few blocks away. Colette told him she had a habit of looking at the decorated cakes, which he thought was an endearingly funny hobby to have, as well as a convenient excuse to get dessert. However, once there, Colette told him every time he asked that she didn’t want to get anything for herself but he could do that if he wished. Then, as soon as he had purchased his frosted scone, she immediately asked for a little taste of it.

They received their new housing assignment at around nine, and Colette wanted to head in and see it as soon as possible. It would be ending the night a little early for Joseph’s tastes, but he’d already had a long day, and it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for him to try and make himself stay out.

The moment they entered the apartment, Colette bypassed the living room and went straight for the bedroom. She saw Joseph’s newest vintage movie poster, one that Suzie had picked out for him, and poked her head out to the living room to make a offhand comment about his taste in films and give him a withering but permissive look. He followed her after peeking into the bathroom to see if there was a bathtub in this apartment, which there wasn’t. He entered to find her sitting on the bed, looking at him expectantly. She smiled, excitedly shifting against the mattress. “Shall we?” she said.

“Shall we... what?” Joseph mused. He had a relative idea of what she was getting at, but he knew better than to assume anything.

“We should get it out of the way now,” Colette went on. “That’s the best way to do it. And if anything needs to be worked on, we’ll have plenty of time to go over it. You have your consent form open on your pod, don’t you?”

She seemed to be refusing to say the word  _ sex _ outright, which struck Joseph as a bit prudish but not enough to bother him. He gave her an approving smile and nodded, taking his pod from his pocket and signing off before setting it on the table. Colette did the same with hers and left it on the nightstand. Then, facing him as she sat on the bed, she kicked off her pumps and began to unzip her dress. She paused when she realized he wasn’t doing the same. “Aren’t you going to undress as well? Or are you one of those weird purists who wants the woman to get completely nude first? Because the poster kind of tipped me off.”

“Oh. S-sorry. I didn’t even realize,” Joseph stuttered. “You want us to both do it at once?” She nodded. He had no idea what she meant by the latter part of her statement, but he brushed it off and did as he was asked, shedding his outfit and setting it on the dresser. 

When Colette was down to her underwear, she looked at him again and blinked in surprise, letting out a soft “Oh, my.” It was clear she liked what she saw. Joseph raised his head and smirked at her, and she scooted herself back against the pillows, spreading her legs out in front of her. Joseph took that as his cue to draw closer and lay himself on top of her. Colette asked him to take her glasses off, and he obliged. Not a moment later, she was kissing him, her thighs wrapped firmly around his hips. As they got more heated, he tried to roll over onto his back and pull her on top of him. She resisted, tugging at his shoulder and murmuring something against his lips. He pulled back, having completely missed it the first time. “What did you say?”

“I said no,” she replied. “I like it better this way.”

Joseph didn’t question it and kept going, though he felt his body was starting to get stiff from holding himself up in one position for that long. It went on like that until Colette started tugging at the waistband of his boxers. He let her slip them off and did the same for her, and she apparently had been anticipating this, because she already had a condom in place. 

“Dear god, can you slow down?” Colette breathlessly requested a few minutes later, her voice pitched up into a shrill whine.

“Yeah, sorry,” was Joseph’s sheepish reply. He did his best to accommodate her, trying not to thrust so roughly, although his whole lower body was aching for more friction.

“Oh... oh, god...” his match whimpered from under him. Her grip tightened on his shoulders, and she squirmed against the mattress. He saw the traces of a climax building on her face. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “I need you to hit it from the back.”

Joseph’s hips slowed down, then stopped. “What?”

Colette didn’t reply, only took the opportunity to shift herself around and shove her ass backward against him. She shivered as he went back in, then said, “Okay, keep going.”

“But... but how am I supposed to see your face?” 

“I don’t want you to see my face,” Colette snapped. “That takes all the sexiness out of it.” 

Joseph didn’t understand in the slightest, since without being able to read her, how was he supposed to know if she was enjoying herself at all, but she was adamant about it and he didn’t want to fight with her on their first night together, so he kept his mouth shut and started fucking her again. Colette was a little more responsive, rocking back against him on her hands and knees, using the pillows to quiet the keening little noises that were the only indication that Joseph was pleasing her at all. 

Eventually, he felt her body shudder around him, and she held the pillows even more tightly to her face as she hit what Joseph figured was an orgasm. She slid off of him, rolled over and sighed. “That was nice, wasn’t it?”

“Certainly,” he listlessly replied.

* * *

Colette’s whole existence seemed to depend on script and schedule. Joseph guessed at what her job must have been; she seemed like an office type, maybe a secretary or head of some department or another. He’d never had a taste for the corporate lifestyle, so he didn’t know what exactly each office was called, and it wasn’t like he could expect Colette to take the time to explain it to him. Maybe he only assumed she was corporate because of how prim she was. 

He learned within their first month together that Colette had a very specific way she liked to do things. She was a creature of habit; every morning she set an alarm, even though she seemed to function on the same schedule every day regardless of whether it was being provided to her or not. Joseph eventually came to adhere to it as well, if only because he felt like it was such an inconvenience to try and separate the timeframes of their days; she stuck to hers so rigidly that she often didn’t consider the fact that he couldn’t sleep when she ran the blender to make herself health smoothies at 6 AM.

She certainly was much more exuberant in the mornings than any other time, which Joseph found strange, considering she only ever wanted to have sex at night. She seemed to have a strange aversion to doing anything even remotely scandalous while the sun was up, like it was some unspeakable taboo that would have life-ruining consequences should she violate it and upset the “natural order” of their relationship. 

He found it ironic how much Colette used that term to describe things, because to him, hardly any of what they did together felt natural. She held his hand in public sometimes, but didn’t want to go any further until they were back in their unit. She enjoyed dressing up, but only to a certain extent. Whenever they went out, she rarely ordered anything that didn’t have the word  _ salad _ in the name, then never failed to pick off of whatever Joseph got. It wouldn’t have bothered him much if she didn’t act the exact same way at home. It seemed like she had a deep, barely-restrained hatred for her own appearance that Joseph couldn’t help but feel concerned about. He never had a chance to bring it up, though, because she invariably brushed him off whenever he tried.

Perhaps strangest of all, Colette always tried to stay quiet when they had sex and asked Joseph to go at her from behind at the last moment. Once he wasn’t fast enough, and she nearly broke down in tears; it took him until then to realize that she was insecure about how she looked and sounded when she had an orgasm. He’d tried to comfort her about it, but she was so embarrassed that she could barely face him, and the whole experience left him afraid to try and bring it up with her again. 

Then came their first fight. That day Joseph came back to their apartment after going out to pick up some groceries for dinner, which Colette ritually insisted she wanted to cook for him, but this time she would need a handful of ingredients they didn’t have at the moment. He opened the door to find her in the living room, sitting with her legs crossed, a look on her face that he hadn’t seen since he had shown up underdressed to their first date.

“Hello,” he greeted her. “I didn’t keep you waiting long, did I? Is there something in the ingredients still missing? I can run back out and get something else if you need it.”

Colette simply stood up and walked towards him, giving him no response but a cold stare. She had never been especially affectionate, but this was extraordinary even for her, and it made Joseph’s heart sink with dread. “Put those down on the counter,” she said. “I found something in our bedroom.”

The ominous presence of Collete’s anger was enough to set off Joseph’s fight-or-flight response, but he did as he was asked, simply not knowing what else to do. He let Colette lead him to the bedroom, which she had started referring to as “our bedroom” within their first week together, much like she had with everything else in the house; having a sense of ownership seemed profoundly important to her. That was probably why she gestured at the small collection of items on the bedside table like they were evidence at a crime scene. “Explain this please, because I seem to be terribly confused.”

The  _ this  _ that Colette was referring to was a single six-color nude eyeshadow palette, a set of contour powders, and a bottle of foundation and small tube of concealer that perfectly matched Joseph’s skin tone. He looked at the arrangement for a moment and sighed. A flurry of things he wanted to say ran through his head, including the fact that Colette very clearly knew what she was looking at, that she knew what it was for, that she shouldn’t have needed an explanation, that frankly it was shocking that she hadn’t suspected it before now, and especially that Joseph wanted an explanation as well since she had been going through his belongings which  _ she herself _ had insisted on sorting, folding and storing separately from her own.

All that came out was, “Look, Colette, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this for a while.”

“And what were you going to tell me?” his match snapped in response. “That you wear makeup all the time and I just happen not to have noticed? That you enjoy getting dolled up like a bloody princess? Because I know for damn sure that you don’t! Now I want you to tell me whose these are!”

“Whose? Well, you found them by digging through my things, so obviously they’re mine,” Joseph tossed back, just as fiery as Colette had been. He wasn’t usually so given to anger, but when someone baited him in the right way, he didn’t take long to get heated.

“Bullshit! You can’t lie to my face. Tell me whose these are!”

“I did, but you seem to have a hard time realizing that!” To prove his point, Joseph snatched up the concealer, smeared a bit on the bridge of his nose, then blended it seamlessly into its surroundings with a fingertip. “There. See? It’s my shade. Do you believe me now?”

The room was dead silent, and Colette was staring at him, her eyes wide and her mouth quivering. Strained little squeaking noises issued from her, and she seemed unable to form any words. She looked as if she had never seen anything quite so horrible in all her life. A second later, she had turned away and stormed out of the room.

Joseph chased after her and caught up just as she was sitting herself back down on the couch, this time slumped over and with her head in her hands. He came to sit beside her, and she immediately scooted away; taking the hint, Joseph kept his distance. “Colette, I told you, I was planning to let you know. I thought it was fairly obvious, but apparently you weren’t picking up on the evidence, so I figured I’d have to explain it. You just never really gave me a chance to talk about it.”

“To talk about what?” Colette whined, lifting her head up and turning an accusatory glare on Joseph. “You wear makeup!”

“Yes, I do. How has it taken you this long to notice?”

“I-I shouldn’t have  _ had _ to notice!” she contested. “I shouldn’t even have to think about something like this! It’s so wrong... ugh, I can barely think...”

“What’s so wrong about it? Did you just think I had flawless skin and no dark circles this whole time? You’ve seen me both with and without it, Colette. You can’t honestly tell me that you never saw a difference.”

“Did you expect me to? Joseph, for fuck’s sake, you’re my  _ boyfriend _ ! You’re a man!”

“Yes, I am. Your point being?”

“I thought that makeup belonged to a girl!”

Joseph sighed, staring dead-eyed at Colette. “Well, it doesn’t. It must be your lucky day.”

Colette huffed and drew her knees up onto the couch, crossing her arms tight over her chest. “I don’t know which would have been worse,” she grumbled. “Finding out you were cheating on me in a system where that should be impossible, or finding out you’re into... into whatever sick shit you use that makeup for.”

“If looking presentable is sick, then you may as well throw me in a hospital,” Joseph retorted. With that, he stood up and left for the kitchen. “While you calm down, I suppose I’ll get dinner started. I’d hate to let the food sit out and spoil.”

For a few solid minutes, Colette was stock-still. She stayed on the couch, not doing so much as looking in Joseph’s direction. He was halfway into her chosen recipe when he finally heard her getting up from the couch and stalking off toward the bedroom. He had a sinking feeling that he knew what she was going in there to do, and the faint sounds of crunching plastic he heard moments later confirmed it. He didn’t stop her, if only because he didn’t want to fight any longer when, as usual, he couldn’t figure out how to reason with her. He didn’t ask questions when he saw her taking the garbage bag out of their bedroom and heading off down the hall with it to throw it into the trash chute.

Colette seemed to resent him all through dinner, barely touching the food he’d cooked as if she were afraid he’d poisoned it or something. He wanted to make some biting comment about her constant weight-watching or ask her what disgusted her more, him or the food, but he didn’t. He figured she’d dealt with the problem, or what she thought was a problem, in the most reasonable way she knew how. He’d been unapologetic, and in Colette’s case, that had probably been a bad move.

But the silence was so deafening, he couldn’t help himself. “You know, given the fact that we’ve been living together for five whole weeks and barely spend any time apart, why was it that the first assumption you made was that I had somehow started seeing another woman and was keeping makeup for her in our unit?”

“Because it wouldn’t make sense to me otherwise,” Colette coldly replied. “Either way, it’s behind us now.”

“I really wish it wasn’t. If you didn’t think I looked any different with or without it, then how the hell did you even realize I had makeup at all?”

“You left the eyeshadow applicator in our bathroom a few days ago.”

“So you got me out of the house and went through my things while I was gone?”

“I figured you wouldn’t tell me if I just asked.”

“So you’d prefer a whole angry confrontation over just asking me where the makeup came from?”

Colette didn’t answer. She just scraped at her plate with her fork without ever actually eating. It felt like a ploy for Joseph to keep talking.

“Would you even notice if I got new makeup and started over? It didn’t seem to make a difference before.”

“If that happens, then I’ll just have to do the same thing again.”

Colette left the table after that, dumping her plate of food into the trash in the kitchen, much like she’d done with his makeup. Clearly she wasn’t in the mood to talk anymore. Joseph would have been surprised if she ever would be again.

* * *

Things were tense and quiet between them for a week after that. Joseph felt like he was walking on eggshells at all times, never knowing what he would do next that would make Colette lose it. His match, on the other hand, lived her life just as she had before, seemingly waiting for him to jump into the little lifeboat of normalcy with her. He knew that she wanted him to ignore what happened and move on, but that didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel safe to him. However, forced to live in such close quarters, he eventually decided that he didn’t have a choice.

From then on, it was back to Colette’s routine. A month passed just as benignly as the first before the fight, and then another. After four months of quiet, uneventful routine, system-scheduled dates at theaters, museums and restaurants and twice-a-week vanilla sex, Joseph came to accept that this was simply the life he was going to live, at least until he reached the deadline, and it was going to be a long, long time before that happened.

The more time he spent with Colette, the more he realized how everything in her life was split up into pink and blue. Dating her was a lesson in how many things a person can possibly experience in his-and-hers fashion. Closest organization, bathroom goods, sides of the bed, even down to the things they put on their dressers and nightstands. She seemed to see everything in the world as either belonging to Joseph or herself. It became irksome after a while, and he started wondering if that was the way she saw him as well.

It would have been forgiving to say that Colette was possessive. It seemed like she wanted to take the system’s schematics to the furthest extreme possible. While it isolated their activities and occupations into dating and nothing else, she seemed to do everything she could to make herself and him the only experience either of them had. She never wanted to talk about the past. A handful of times Joseph casually asked who else she had dated in the system, just out of curiosity, but as with many things, she brushed the questions off, and he learned after a few attempts that the topic was probably off-limits. On other occasions he asked her if she ever wanted to go out and do something that the system hadn’t provided for them, and she’d laughed at him. She said that if they weren't going to listen when the system told them what to do, where to go and when to do things, why bother having the system at all? So, in between the appointments that their pods prescribed to them, they let their lives become stagnant.

Then there was the time that Colette had snapped at him for talking to a waitress for a little too long. He’d liked the color of her hair and was intrigued by the sigil tattooed on her wrist; he wanted to ask what dye she used and what the symbol meant, nothing more, but Colette was insistent that he was “making eyes” at her, whatever the fuck that even meant. After that, he realized that there were a lot of things Colette seemed to staunchly believe in that he didn’t understand. He began picking up on the fact that every time his gaze wandered away from her in public, she gripped his hand a little tighter, pulled on him a little more insistently, or got a little more affectionate for a brief period once they had the door of their apartment safely closed behind them.

Was Colette afraid that he would cheat on her? Definitely; it seemed that she was making that as obvious as possible, though for some reason she never actually voiced her concerns to him. Was he actually doing that? No, though the longer the shenanigan between them went on, the more surprising that fact was. It was no secret to Joseph that he absolutely despised her. She was demanding, cold, clinical, seeming more like a Stepford wife than a real, living person, but he’d been informed already that the system had him stuck. He couldn’t break their relationship off himself, and Colette had said it was impossible to cheat in the system. There were probably safeguards against it that he didn’t even know about.

The encounter with the waitress had been harmless, and Joseph knew that, even if Colette refused to believe it. He had spoken to her for no more than a minute. But before he knew it, he was touching himself with her in mind. He imagined that he had told Colette that he needed the restroom, then she would be waiting in the narrow hallway by the kitchen, and she would drag him out the back door and into the alley by the dumpster and push him up against the wall, then his hands would slide into the back pockets of her tight denim shorts and grab at every last lucious inch of her, and then she became Suzie, then it was Wendell turning him around and starting to grind up against him from behind, and the moment he imagined hot breath on his neck, he would hear Caesar’s voice whispering in his ear and it would all come to a screeching halt as he finished himself off.

Joseph wanted to cheat on Colette, and badly. He would have done it the first chance he got, if she ever bothered to give him one. Even spending every second of every day at her side, he felt lonelier than he’d ever been. He missed the easy intimacy he had with Suzie. Even Wendell would have cut it. And for some strange reason, Caesar stuck in his head like a little bit of dust in all the corners that he just couldn’t seem to sweep clean.

Eventually he gave up on the fantasy about the waitress and just started thinking about him. He knew that Colette was starting to get pissed off at him for having suddenly developed an insatiable taste for long showers, but what started every time as just a way to work his frustrations out quickly turned into a long, quiet conversation with himself about why, after almost a year, he was still so hung up on a man who had been a part of his life for less than a whole day.

Maybe Suzie had been right when she’d said that it was all the not-knowing that kept Joseph clinging to Caesar like he did. As long as he didn’t know, he would be wondering, and wondering could become a slippery slope into being completely smitten. It wasn’t even really him that Joseph liked; it was the idea of him. Joseph was well aware of that, and he scolded himself for it constantly.

But that moment, when they had been lying in bed and Joseph hadn’t been able to sleep... Caesar had looked into his eyes and he seemed to know something that Joseph had barely even begun to think yet. The memory of it chilled him to the core.

Then, one night, it all became too much.

Joseph was in the living room, taking a cup of tea and reading a webcomic on his tablet. Colette was in the kitchen, going through their mail. It was never anything interesting in the system. For the most part, it was all junk mail, usually advertisements for new features that were getting added that couples could go and explore together. Colette threw them out more often than not before Joseph could see them. He tried to focus on the webcomic and not think about the stranglehold that his latest relationship seemed to have on his life, or the sordid mechanisms he used to cope with it, but he ultimately failed. He locked his tablet and set it aside, looking behind him into the kitchen. “Colette?”

“Yes, Joseph?” She always used his full name. Not JoJo, no nicknames, no pet names or anything. Sometimes Joe, but he couldn’t stand the sound of that. He’d come to terms a while ago with the fact that Colette was mind-blowingly uncreative.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever had one experience that has just stuck with you? Like, maybe it was one stupid little thing. It seems like it shouldn’t matter, but for some reason, no matter what you do, your brain never seems to want to get rid of that one particular memory. It just stays with you, and you can never shake it off.”

Colette was quiet for a moment, and he heard a pause in the shuffling of envelopes on the counter. “Um...” she mused. “That’s an interesting question, to be sure. Where did all this come from?”

“Nowhere, really,” Joseph replied. “Just a little lost in thought is all. Have you had any experiences like that though?”

“There is this one memory I have from going on a vacation to the seashore when I was a little girl. It was my first time going on a ferris wheel. It doesn’t seem all that important, but I can remember it down to every last detail. Why do you ask? Have you had something like that happen to you?”

He couldn’t hold it back any longer. Out with it, he told himself. “Colette, I just... I keep thinking about my first match in the system-”

Joseph was interrupted by the sharp slap of paper against granite. “I thought we made it clear that we weren't going to talk about this.”

“I know, but does that seem right to you?” Joseph contested. “Colette, we’ve been together for, what, coming up on eleven months now? I feel like I barely know you.”

“What do you mean? You know me plenty well,” Colette responded. “You know what my favorite restaurants are, you can basically order  _ for  _ me when we go out on dates, you know my favorite color, and a load of other stuff. You even remembered my birthday and brought me flowers.”

“Yeah, I figured you’d like that, but that’s not what I’m getting at. That’s all fluff. It’s dinner table conversation. I feel like I only know what you want the whole public to know about you, whatever the hell you think is proper and how you want to appear. Everything I do with you feels like an act.”

“Joseph, it isn’t an act.”

“Then why don’t you ever relax and tell me something about yourself that doesn’t come out of a dating handbook for once? When am I going to be ready to know the  _ real _ Colette, huh? I’ve been wanting to be an open book this whole time, but it’s like you’re fucking illiterate. There’s a lot that I’ve been completely ready and willing to talk to you about, but you never ask.”

“And what do you want to tell me about? How many people you’ve slept with in the past?” Colette quipped. “I don’t want to know about that, Joseph.”

“Well, that’s the kind of stuff we should feel safe talking to each other about in a relationship!” he shot back. “Frankly, if you would just stop being so uptight all the time, maybe we wouldn’t fight nearly as much as we do! And we definitely wouldn’t have fought about the makeup!”

Colette’s face pinched with anger. “I thought we were finished with that.”

“Apparently we are, and have been for a long time, since I don’t want to waste my credits on something you’ll just throw in the trash. Which, mind you, is also why I stopped cooking.”

“It’s because you can’t cook.”

“Can’t, or am not allowed, because you don’t think it’s proper for me?”

“That has nothing to do with it!”

“Well why don’t you ask my ex how I did in the kitchen? I’m sure she’d think you’re lovely.”

He expected Colette to snap at him again, but instead she grabbed a stack of brochures from the counter and hurled them at his head. The cardstock slips hit him square in the face, and he reeled back, falling off the couch. He ducked down for a second, then raised himself back up. He saw Colette leaning over the counter, her face in her hands. “Fuck... Joseph, I’m sorry. I just hate when you get vindictive like that.”

“I strike low when I have to, Colette. You should know this by now.”

“No one should strike low. It’s tasteless.” With that, she went on shuffling through the last few pieces of mail, like nothing had ever happened.

Joseph curled up on the couch, feeling the sting of a papercut starting to bloom on his cheek. He watched Colette, seething but having lost the energy to do anything about it. In the middle of it all, she picked up a creamy white envelope decorated with gold ink. She smiled at it and gleefully ripped it open. “Joseph, come look at this!” she called to him.

Joseph didn’t get up from the couch. “What is it?” he asked numbly.

“It’s an invitation. Someone in the system’s met their final match, and the pairing ceremony is in two weeks!” she announced. “Oh, we have to go. The receptions are always the loveliest.”

“I thought you didn’t like knowing about other people’s love lives.”

“This is different,” Colette insisted. “Come on, it’ll be so much fun! We get to see a happy couple set off into the rest of their lives.”

“We don’t  _ know them _ .”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s going to be free cake and champagne. You’ll at least have to appreciate that much, because we  _ are _ going.”

That, it seemed, was the end of it.

* * *

The pairing ceremony, as Joseph had expected, was tacky and boring.

Flowers were arranged on just about every available surface he could see, and their omnipresence saturated the event hall with a heavy perfume that was nearly powerful enough to choke him. It smelled more like a funeral than any wedding he had ever been to, like the florist had sent in fake blossoms artificially scented with what someone thinks a flower is supposed to smell like but doesn’t even vaguely resemble the actual thing. The tablecloths were white, the chairs white, the place cards white and the roses and baby’s breath centerpieces all white; there was so much fucking white that Joseph was sure he would go blind. He didn’t know who was in charge of decoration, but he hoped they were getting sacked immediately after this fiasco ended.

He came wearing a navy suit that Colette had picked out for him, wearing a tie on her insistence. He’d kept his mouth shut about how the getup made him feel like an aging politician. His match had bought a new dress for the occasion, a taffeta a-line with a midi hem in her signature color of mauve. He wondered what her fixation with it was, because he needed something to think about while the strangers on the flower-lined stage in front of them gushed their vows to each other. Their words spewed from their mouths like a testimonial straight out of a commercial.

“I never would have believed that the system works,” the woman said. “But in spite of everything, I tried and I ended up with him, the man of my dreams. I’ve never felt a connection like this before, and without the system, I don’t think I ever would have.”

“We are living proof that love is real, and there’s a perfect match out there for everyone,” said the man beside her. “I’ve never loved someone like so deeply or truly. I’m so grateful to the system every day for bringing her into my life.”

“I found my happily ever after with him. It’s just like living a fairy tale, and I’m never looking back.”

“And you truly are my princess.”

The crowd laughed.

“I love you so much, dearest.”

“I love you too, baby.”

They kissed, and everyone cheered. If Joseph were keeping track of how many times they’d said the word  _ love _ during their lengthy speeches, he would have had to sprout at least sixty new fingers to count on.

Colette led him to their assigned table, then sent him off to get them both drinks. His match talked animatedly with the two couples that sat alongside them while Joseph remained quiet and sipped one glass of champagne after another. The alcohol content was far too low to get him tipsy enough to get through this event with his sanity intact.

He didn’t know why he was so bitter. He knew this was supposed to be a happy event. Plus, the boring part of the ceremony was over, and the reception was really the only reason anyone came to weddings at all. It might have been the overabundance of credit to the system that the couple had given in their vows, or their repetitiveness, or the sheer stereotypicality of the whole affair. Of course, it was a  _ man and woman _ getting married, presumably straight, talking about fairy tales and soulmates and more hackneyed bullshit of the same kind. Or maybe he was just bitter that some people were having such luck with the system while he was stuck in what might have been the worst relationship to ever survive past its first week of existence.

The reception had him surrounded by strangers on all sides. Normally this wasn’t much of a problem; Joseph was friendly and enjoyed the company of strangers most of the time, but with Colette at his side, he felt suffocated. He was afraid to let his eyes linger anywhere for too long, or to accidentally say the wrong thing to some lady or another for fear that his match would get cross with him again. Impulsively, he thought of the waitress, how mad Colette had been about her, and now how badly he wanted to get fucked by her or just about anyone who wasn’t Colette.

Two hours passed at a snail’s pace, and eventually Colette got up from her place to “powder her nose,” which was her sanitized way of saying she’d drunk too much champagne and was probably on the verge of pissing herself. She and the other two women all left the table in a group, and Joseph watched the other two men across from him immediately begin to talk about their matches while they were absent. He took that as an opportunity to get up and slip away from the table.

Colette had been right about one thing: Joseph really did appreciate the abundant supply of free food. He stumbled across the dessert table, which had just been set up after the entrees were cleared. He quickly snatched a slice of the cake for himself before the other guests depleted it completely. After finishing that, he went back to browse everything else; the table was laid out in an impressive array of petit fours, eclairs, cake pops, cookie platters and decorative chocolates. He picked at the spread, wanting to sample at least one of everything, when one thing in particular caught his eye; towards the end, far from the cake, there was a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries. He hadn’t tasted one of those in ages, and right then, he felt absolutely desperate for one.

Joseph made his way over and reached for the platter, his fingers hovering over one of the berries at the top of the pile. Without warning, a warm and callused hand nudged against his as it reached for the exact same berry. By instinct, Joseph pulled his hand back, turning his gaze up to see who had intercepted him. His heart froze as he was met with a pair of achingly familiar green eyes.

Caesar stared back at him, seeming just as shocked as he was to find him there. His delicate lips were parted slightly, like he’d been about to speak but had forgotten the words he’d intended to use. 

Joseph similarly choked on his own voice for a long moment before he finally managed to cough up one thing. “Caesar,” he murmured.

The man before him let out a soft breath and nodded, as if affirming that it was indeed him standing there in front of Joseph. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said.

“I didn’t either,” Joseph replied. “I-I mean... you. I didn’t think I was going to see... y-you know what I mean.”

Caesar smiled at him and laughed a little, a sound that made something deep inside of Joseph start to flutter. “Of course. I didn’t see you at any of the other ceremonies they’ve been hosting. They have one of these things almost every month.”

“Really? Are they all this boring?”

Another laugh. “Sometimes no, but overwhelmingly, yes. Most people have no creativity.”

“You know, this whole time I’ve been wondering where the hell they got all these flowers. I mean, the place is covered wall to wall with these bloody things. It’s like they cut down an entire farm just to host one stupid ceremony.”

“I heard something from one of the guests. You see all the ones that are on the upper parts of the walls and strung across the ceiling?”

“Yeah?”

“They’re holograms.”

Joseph raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“That’s what I was told. Those ones are virtual, and the scent in the air is synthetic. It’s getting pumped in through hidden vents to make the place smell more flowery.”

“No wonder this whole place felt fake to me. I thought it smelled like a funeral in here.”

“It’s a funeral for originality, that’s for damn sure.”

Joseph snorted while trying not to laugh out loud. It took everything he had not to say  _ God, I’ve missed you so much _ . “It’s been ages. How have you been?”

“I’ve been alright,” Caesar replied. “Things are going well, I think. I’ve been through, uh... a few more matches. It’s been pretty standard stuff, sometimes around three or four months. I’ve had twenty-four hour matches too, though. Those have been...” He pursed his lips and sighed, shaking his head slowly. “More often disappointing than not, if I’m honest.”

“Oh. Well, that’s a shame,” Joseph said sympathetically. “You’ve been moving faster than I have. I’ve only hit my fourth. She’s a long-term engagement, though.”

“How long-term do you mean?”

“A year and a half.”

Caesar’s eyes widened. “The system can assign people for that long?”

“I didn’t know it could do that either,” Joseph confessed. “But here I am, almost a year deep into a relationship with no way out.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds almost like you  _ want _ to get out of it,” Caesar pointed out, his brows knitting in concern. “Is everything okay?”

Joseph felt a knot forming in his stomach. He felt like the safest thing to do was to keep quiet about it, but he just needed to tell someone so badly. “Well...” he began after a long, uncomfortably quiet stretch. “If you really want to know the truth, I’m-”

Before he could finish, a deep, oaky voice interrupted them. “Cara, ti stavo cercando dappertutto.” Joseph’s eyes flitted away from Caesar and he caught sight of a man lingering nearby, slowly making his way over to them. He was slim and well-built, not to mention devilishly handsome, with piercing hazel eyes and rich waves of mahogany hair. He gave Joseph a quick once-over, then draped an arm around Caesar’s shoulders. “Chi è questo? Vi conoscete?”

Caesar looked over at him and smiled softly. “Ah, Emilio. Sono davvero andato a vagare così a lungo?” He turned back to Joseph and gestured to the man beside him. “Joseph, this is my current match, Emilio.”

All of a sudden, Joseph saw himself paling in comparison to the man standing in front of him. Of course Caesar’s new match looked like a fucking Renaissance painting. Joseph had never in his life felt so self-conscious as he did at that moment. “Lovely to meet you,” he calmly greeted him all the same.

“The same to you,” Emilio cordially replied.

“You know, Caesar was my first match. We were only together for eighteen hours.” 

“So the stories were true,” Caesar’s match said, raising an eyebrow. “And who would have thought? You really do look like a Brit punk Adonis.”

“Oh my god.” Caesar immediately blushed and looked away, pretending to be completely preoccupied with stuffing a chocolate strawberry into his mouth. 

Joseph just laughed, rubbing bashfully at the back of his neck. “D-did you really say that about me, Caesar?”

His ex-match stayed quiet for a moment, looking more nervous than Joseph had ever seen him. He choked down the strawberry and muttered a quiet, “Okay, I might have talked about you a little too much.”

“Oh, please. We need  _ something _ to use as a conversation starter,” Emilio said, smiling.

“Okay, okay! Let’s move on, please,” Caesar insisted. “How’ve you been? We were talking about your current match?”

“Yeah, my fourth,” Joseph answered, nodding to Emilio to fill him in. “We’ve been matched for around a year now, actually.”

If he wasn’t mistaken, he saw Caesar’s face sink a little when he said it again. “A year?” Emilio interjected. “Wow, that’s long.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Joseph sighed. “What about you two?”

“This is my seventh.”

A second later, Caesar added, “My sixteenth.”

“Sixteenth?” Joseph parroted back to Caesar, his eyes wide. “Are you serious?”

His ex nodded. “I guess the system thinks I need to have a speed-run before it finally settles me with someone long-term. Which isn’t completely a bad thing, I suppose. At least I know it’s being thorough.”

Joseph nodded in agreement, and opened his mouth to say something more, but before he could speak he saw Caesar’s eyes shift suddenly to his left. A second later, there was a small, manicured hand tugging at his arm.

“Joe, where have you been?” Colette asked. “You can’t just leave me hanging like that. I had no idea where you were.”

“Sorry,” he responded automatically. “I just needed to get up for a bit. Clear my head and all. The table was starting to get a bit tense for me.”

Colette seemed reluctant to accept that as an answer, but she eventually came to terms with it and nodded. She then looked up at the men that stood in front of him. “Who are they? Friends of yours?”

“Sort of,” Joseph said. He raised a hand and waved it toward Caesar. “Colette, this is Caesar. He was my first match with the system.”

His ex offered his current match a genial smile and seemed on the verge of greeting her with a customary  _ Ciao, bella _ , but Colette cut in before he could. “I... I’m sorry, what?” she asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“I matched with Joseph a while back,” Caesar answered her this time. “It’s a funny story. We were only together for eighteen hours. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you yet.”

For a brief moment, a painful silence hovered over the four of them. Joseph felt the color drain from his face as Colette’s nails dug sharply into his elbow, and he knew then that something had just gone horribly wrong. Neither Caesar nor Emilio could have missed it, and he felt a touch of guilt settle in his chest. Thankfully, Colette didn’t explode then and there. Instead, she pulled Joseph back. “Well, I think we’ve been here for quite long enough. Joe, I’d really like to get out of these shoes. It’s been a joy meeting you all.”

He didn’t fight her when she started marching toward another area of the venue hall. Before she dragged him off, he risked one last glance over his shoulder and saw Caesar watching him, a look of unmistakable sadness in his eyes. Then they passed behind the corner of a wall and he disappeared from Joseph’s line of sight.

Colette stood firm, her pumps planted resolutely on the ground, and her arms crossed over her chest as she pushed Joseph into a corner. “What the hell was that?” she demanded.

This time, Joseph had no intention of playing nice with her. “If you’d bothered asking sooner, you would have known.”

“You can’t have dated a man, Joseph,” his match quipped. “You’re with me. You like women. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“Why can’t all of it be the truth?” he tossed back. 

“Because if you’re matched with a woman, you can’t have been matched with a man!”

“You know what, Colette? You’re right,” Joseph sardonically replied. “I haven’t been matched with a man. I’ve been matched with two.”

Colette’s mouth dropped open and he watched her eyes fill with rage. Her hands twitched at her sides, flexing and relaxing sporadically like she desperately wanted to do something with them but knew better than to actually put her thoughts into action. “I... I don’t even know what to say to you right now,” she eventually spat out.

“You can start by admitting that all of this happened because you didn’t want to know anything about my dating history.”

“Don’t you fucking dare try to turn this around on me!”

“And why the hell shouldn’t I?”

Joseph was expecting another smart response from Colette. Instead he got a hand that came flying at his face and struck him hard across the cheek. Her long nails raked across over skin, and he gasped, one hand coming up to cover the sore, red spot she’d left on his face. 

“If I had wanted a _ fairy _ prince, I would have asked for one,” she snarled at him.

Joseph stared at her, still covering the assaulted side of his face. At first, he couldn’t believe the words he’d just heard come out of her mouth. Then, slowly, it all began to make sense. Everything she’d done before then- throwing out the makeup, not letting him cook or clean, keeping their clothes separate, policing not only herself but every little thing he did as well- it was all because of this. 

“You shut your fucking mouth right now,” he growled.

“Why don’t you make me?” Colette retorted. “Or are you not enough of a man to do it?”

She didn’t deserve a proper response from him anymore. Joseph roughly shoved her aside and started walking, not looking back even when he heard Colette’s heels clipping against the floor as she ran after him, shouting his name and hurling slurs at him, for once not caring what the people around her thought.

_ Good _ , he thought to himself. He hoped the other guests ripped her a new one for all the things she said as he stormed out of the reception.

* * *

Joseph didn’t come home that night. He stayed out on his own and drank himself into a stupor. He thought about finding a hookup, but in the system, damn near everyone was either already taken or too invested in waiting for their next match to bother with him. So he wandered out to a park by himself and passed out in the grass, never making his way back to his unit at sometime around 6 AM the next day. Colette would be up by then, he knew. 

When he opened the door, there she was, just as he’d expected: standing at the kitchen counter and running the the blender so loudly that it rattled his hungover brain. “Good morning,” she said calmly, as if the entire previous day hadn’t happened. “Why didn’t you come home last night?”

Joseph stared at her, his bloodshot eyes level with her face. “Fuck you, Colette.”

She almost dropped her health smoothie as she removed it from the blender. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he said harshly. “You know damn well what I said. Fuck you, and fuck everything you’re trying to do here. I hope you spend the rest of your days in this hellhole and no one ever gets paired with you for as long as you live.”

“Joseph, what has gotten into you?” Colette asked in shock, her eyes wide and angry. “Where have you been all night? Are you drunk?”

“I fucking  _ wish _ I was. That’s the only way I’ve been able to put up with you and your stupid antics.” He limped into the living room and sank down on the couch, promptly shrugging off his jacket and tie and throwing them to the floor. “You know, I think I finally understand you,”  he went on, not sure if Colette was listening, but wanting to get everything out anyway. “I’ve been so confused about every little thing you do. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out when the answer was in front of me the whole time.”

Colette didn’t respond to him. She just kept on going about her day. It was so typical of her it sickened him to think about it.

“We don’t fit,” he said firmly. “I don’t know why the system stuck us together, and I don’t think I ever will. I could never live with you, and I don’t know who in their right mind could. Not when you’re a homophobic, sexist piece of shit who was taught how relationships work by E. L. fucking James!”

She’d stopped pacing around the apartment by then. She was standing still at long last, finally listening to what he was saying. He took a moment to catch his breath. He hadn’t spoken this long in quite a while.

“If you’re going to say something, go on and say it. Let me know what other slurs you want to throw at me. I’d appreciate getting some honesty from you for once.”

Colette said nothing. She waited behind him for a little longer, then he heard her cross the apartment. The door swung open, then closed and locked. She’d gone out for her morning jog and left him on his own.

Joseph got up from the couch and staggered to the bathroom. He was horribly uncomfortable and in dire need of a shower after spending the night lying in the dirt. Maybe he could burn the stupid suit she’d made him wear after he took it off. At least, if he was alone, she couldn’t stop him. Alone, he didn’t have to be with her at all.

* * *

It all ended rather quickly after that.

Joseph had six months left being stuck in the couple’s unit with Colette. He ignored her for every possible second of it. He took to sleeping on the couch instead of enduring Colette’s weird rules about his-and-hers sides of the bedroom, and it wasn’t long before most of his clothes had come with him, and eventually his posters as well. His match had never liked them anyway.

That wasn’t to say that Colette didn’t at least make an attempt to fix things. At the moments when Joseph had no choice but to talk to her, she tried to drag things out and discuss what had happened. Joseph wanted no part of it. For an entire year, Colette had wanted to moderate all their conversations, never get into anything that had happened before they had met or that diverged from her image of them as a picture-perfect couple. He’d tried over and over to talk things out and she had persistently pushed him aside until he gave up. Now that she couldn’t pretend they were living a Hollywood paradigm anymore, the past was all she wanted to talk about. The heel turn was too little, and far too late. 

She could probably tell that the events at the reception were clawing at him, and maybe she even felt guilty for slapping him across the face and about calling him just about every single derogatory word for “gay” that the English language had to offer, but Joseph couldn’t bring himself to care. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter what the system said. He had well and truly broken up with her, and even though the system still forced them to reside in the same space, he would uphold his decision in every way he could.

When their time finally ran out and the automated cars arrived to whisk them away, Colette tried to kiss him goodbye. He didn’t look back as he walked right past her and climbed into the backseat of the car, slamming the door shut behind him. His single unit was ready and waiting for him at the end of the ride. He slept for nearly a whole three days after it was over, and at long last, the system didn’t match him up again the second a relationship ended. He was glad for it. For a while, anyway.

First, a few days passed without another notification from his pod. Then a week. Then another. Joseph genuinely couldn’t remember the last time he had been so completely alone for so long. Of course, nearly any situation would have been better than the one he’d just left, but being stuck by himself in a single unit was only a marginal improvement. 

The night that had ended with him sleeping in a park had been his first taste of what it was like to be unmatched in the system. Every last person he met was either taken already or obsessed with the idea of reaching that state. No one wanted to talk, or flirt, or have a practice-snog with him so they wouldn’t be rusty when the system finally set them up with a new suitor. On the rare occasion that he did manage to strike up a conversation, it either never lasted or it never veered outside the realm of wondering who would be the next match. It became a haunting pattern after a while, and Joseph wondered what the hell had happened to all these people around him. Had they been brainwashed or something? Did they forget how to talk about anything other than dating? Worst of all, he slowly began to believe that this was the result of being single for too long in the system’s grasp. He’d done something when he’d ended his time with Colette on such a harsh and messy note. Maybe he’d permanently wrecked something in the system, and now the whole algorithm was thrown off and he’d never be matched again. He was genuinely afraid that, after enough time had passed, his brain might give up and he would go mad. 

When his pod finally pinged him nearly a month later, Joseph almost cried. At long last, he had been blessed with a new match. He had a date in a restaurant in the entertainment district at 6:30 PM. He didn’t care who it was with. That time, he swore to himself he would look perfect, and he wouldn’t be so much as a single minute late.

It was about damn time for him to get himself together and move on.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good god. That sure was.........something.  
> Thanks for sitting through it with me.  
> See you next chapter.


	5. Caesar, part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone who stayed with me after the shitstorm that was the last chapter. If you managed to sit through it, good for you. I'm very proud of you for putting up with the garbage in order to get to the good shit. And don't you worry, it's on its way.  
> I know the last chapter was sort of a massive pitfall in terms of how this story is going for Our Hero Joseph, and I just want to thank everyone who read it and reassured me that my portrayal of an abusive relationship was at least marginally accurate. I was trying to get at the subtle, needling kind of abuse that isn't always visible and often even people involved don't realize how unhealthy their behavior is. Not to talk at people or anything, I just hope it came across clearly and made sense and was respectful and I'm rambling now and need to shut the hell up.  
> Thanks again to everyone who's been sticking with me through this whole story. I'm glad you enjoy reading my shit. I appreciate you endlessly, all 217 of you at this point posting this chapter. Extra special thanks to cicada_s and Jasmine. You're both mind-bogglingly precious.   
> CONTENT WARNING for abuse mention and alcohol use.   
> Also copious amounts of sexual tension, gay crimes, and some actual sexual content.  
> So, now that you've been sufficiently WARNED...  
> time to read my shit. Strap in, babes, because this is going to be a long one.

 

 

After two hours of going through one outfit after another, fixing his hair, putting on cologne and making up his face, Joseph set out to find his new location. It was ten metro stops away, at an address he vaguely recognized, and he was anxious the whole time he spent in transit. He fidgeted with the hems of his sleeves as he walked toward an eerily familiar location, one he was sure he’d seen before but definitely hadn’t visited in a long time. He walked in, letting himself be bathed in the soft, warm light of the vintage crystal chandeliers. Table 38, his pod instructed him, so he made his way to a corner booth at the back of the restaurant and took a seat.

The minutes ticked past in silence. The server came to the table and offered to take his order, and Joseph politely declined, the knots in his stomach making it impossible for him to feel hunger. He anxiously watched the door, then resorted to watching the seconds pass on his pod screen. Briefly, he was afraid that maybe, somehow, his match had opted out of the date and decided not to show up. Then he sensed someone approaching the table. His attention finally caught, he raised his head to meet his match and a second later felt his heart seize up in his chest.

Caesar stood in front of him. He looked vaguely tired, not nearly as put-together as he had either of the two times he’d seen him before. His shirt was untucked, and his vest hung loose and unbuttoned from his shoulders. There was no silk tie or sleek leather belt this time, and his hair was tousled like it had been styled in a rush rather than with neat, intentional waves. Joseph could almost have laughed at the irony of it all. 

“Hi,” Caesar greeted him, a nervous smile curling the corners of his lips.

For a moment, Joseph’s throat turned dry, and he couldn’t remember what words could even come close to verbalizing whatever it was that he felt. Eventually, he settled on a simple, breathless, “Hello. What are you doing here?”

“My pod sent me to table thirty-eight,” Caesar clarified. “And, um... Unless you just walked in and decided to stay here...”

Joseph’s eyes widened as the realization sank in. “Oh,” he whispered. “W-wait... You mean...”

Caesar turned his pod’s screen towards Joseph to show him the proof behind what he’d said. There indeed was the address of the restaurant, hovering brightly above the designated time: 6:30 PM. “I know I’m late, and I probably look like hell. I came here in a bit of a rush,” he confessed.

“A bit of a rush?” Joseph giggled, his face now melting into a smile. “Well, you’re here now, so feel free to stop rushing. Come and sit down. I haven’t placed any orders yet.”

His ex-match, now apparently his match once more, gladly obeyed and slid into the booth across from him. “I’ve been single for barely three hours and the system already wants to hook me up again,” he sighed, holding his pod up and glaring at it. “Whoever wrote the algorithm for these things clearly has no patience whatsoever.”

“Three hours? Damn, that’s a rush,” Joseph remarked. “At least it didn’t keep you hanging.” Caesar looked up at him and raised an eyebrow, and he took that as an invitation to elaborate. “I haven’t had a match in almost a month. Nearly went out of my skull, I was so lonely and bored.”

“It must have been awful,” Caesar said softly, his tone empathetic. “And you’d just been in a relationship for...”

“A year and a half. Eighteen months.”

Caesar pursed his lips together and sighed. “How did that work out for you?” he asked quietly. 

Joseph could tell from his tone that he was treading carefully on purpose. “How much did you see at the pairing ceremony?” he asked in return.

“Hardly any of it. But I heard more than enough.”

A thick, heavy silence lingered for a moment, and Joseph felt a bit ashamed for their first conversation as a newly matched couple to have gotten so dark so quickly. He watched Caesar bite his lip and shift uncomfortably in his seat until the server returned and asked if Joseph and his date were ready to place their orders yet. He put in his request for shepherd’s pie and a glass of port wine, then nodded to Caesar. To his surprise, his match didn’t even open his menu.

“Pasta al nero di seppia,” he requested confidently. “And I’ll have a port with that as well.”

Joseph looked wide-eyed at him as the server left the table. “Isn’t that-”

“Exactly what I got the last time I was here?” Caesar finished for him, laughing a little. “It’s not you, Joseph. It’s the place. They make it better here than anywhere else in the city.”

“Really?” Joseph felt a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You know, al nero di seppia... I looked it up after the first time you got it. That’s made with squid ink.”

“Incredible. The man knows how to use the internet.”

“W-what... hey. Don’t patronize me for not knowing about this before!” he protested. “I was just wondering how that tastes. I’d imagine it’s fishy, but it’s ink, and that just makes me think it tastes like you’re eating paint or something.”

“I can assure you, Joseph, it doesn’t taste like paint.”

“Then what does it taste like? Can I get a description?”

“I don’t know,” Caesar coyly replied. “Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

“Is that an invitation to split yours with me?”

“It’s within the realm of possibility.”

“Then you’re welcome to everything I’ve ordered. I’m sure it’ll be wildly dull compared to yours, but... you know. If it’s not reciprocal then that’s just unfair.”

“You have a point,” Caesar agreed. “I might just take you up on that offer.”

Pasta with squid ink, as it turned out, didn’t taste fishy or anything like how Joseph had imagined paint would taste. It was salty, clean, almost like kelp. If the smell of the ocean were a taste, that would be it. He understood then why Caesar liked it so much. Maybe, if they were together long enough, he would get a chance to learn how to cook it with him.

That thought stayed with Joseph for an uncomfortably long time. He stayed at the table, looking at Caesar from across a scattering of empty plates, an oppressive feeling hanging over him, insisting that he was forgetting something. It took him a moment to recall what it was. “We never checked our expiration date,” he pointed out.

The second he mentioned it, he saw Caesar’s face wither slightly. “Oh. Right,” he said nervously. “Well... do you want to?”

“I kind of thought it was mandatory. I’ve never been matched with anyone who didn’t check the expiry on the first date.”

“I’ve forgotten to a few times. It’s really not as big a deal as it seems at first,” Caesar explained. “We don’t have to. Unless you want to, anyway.”

Joseph paused. There had been a catch in Caesar’s voice that his match had probably assumed he’d miss, but he most certainly hadn’t. “Do you not want to check the expiration?” he quietly asked.

Caesar remained quiet for a moment, then slowly he shook his head, averting his eyes from Joseph. “I’ll be honest with you, I kind of hate the fact that we have them at all. I can’t totally explain why. There’s just something so foreboding about knowing exactly how long your relationship is going to last before you get forced to separate.”

Joseph nodded in agreement, remembering Suzie. “It’s happened to me before,” he said. “Either that, or you realize early on that you can’t stand the person you’re with and it ends up feeling like a bloody prison sentence.”

“Is that what your past 18 months have been?”

Joseph cringed internally. Caesar’s words had cut surprisingly deep; still, Joseph wasn’t about to claim his match was wrong. “Unfortunately, yes. But... but if you don’t mind, I was hoping we could talk about that, er... somewhere a little less public.”

“Some other time, then,” his match assured him. “I guess we should check the expiration anyway, since you brought it up.”

“We don’t have to.”

Caesar looked at him, seeming surprised. “Are you sure? I mean... just because I said it doesn’t mean you have to agree with me.”

“I don’t want to do it either,” Joseph said firmly. “Maybe the reason why matches don’t work out is because we have all these expectations of them, what we think is proper for however long, stuff like that. And that must be what destroys them in the end. Maybe if, just this once, we don’t think about it, it’ll be better.”

A quiet settled over their table once more, only this time the lull was calm and somewhat comforting instead of tense. Caesar seemed to relax, and he picked his pod up off the table and stuck it into his pocket. “We’re starting fresh, then. No more expectations.” He paused, then added, “Alright, maybe  _ some _ expectations. You know you’re actually into men this time, right?”

There was the Caesar he remembered. “Oh, definitely,” he confirmed, a lilt of laughter in his voice. “I could tell you all about it over dessert.” He paused, grinned wickedly and added, “Unless, of course, you’d rather dessert be  _ you _ .”

Caesar’s mouth fell open and his face flushed pink. “Oh my god, have you always been this nasty?”

“Only when I’m around you.”

That seemed to get Caesar thoroughly flustered, and he looked away, the blush on his face deepening to red. “S-stop it,” he sputtered. Joseph obeyed, which Caesar apparently hadn’t been expecting; a second later his match looked back at him with both surprise and amusement on his face. “Okay, never mind. Continue.”

Joseph smiled and did as Caesar asked. The night seemed off to a good start.

* * *

The pods ended their date surprisingly early, by Joseph’s standards. After their server brought them shortcake and flutes of limoncello, their devices started chiming, letting them know that their new unit was ready and that they should move into it as soon as humanly possible. That was held off until after dessert was finished, and the two of them took their sweet time making their way to the new building. It looked basically the same as every other one Joseph had seen, the small colonnade and hedges out front being the only defining features. Once in the building, they wasted no time looking around; they had both gotten so accustomed to the layout of the couples’ units that there wasn’t much to explore at all.

Caesar made a beeline for the couch and collapsed onto it. “Dear god, it’s been a long day.”

“Has it?” Joseph followed him and settled in next to his feet. “Mine’s been completely empty except for this.”

“Do you want to talk about that?”

“If you’re willing to listen.” A long, uncomfortable pause, then a few choice words Joseph added under his breath. “Colette wasn’t.”

“I’m going to take that as a  _ yes, you do want to talk about it _ .”

Joseph was jarred for a second, unaware that Caesar had actually been listening; he quickly tried to cover his tracks. “It’s a long story,” he blurted out. “We’d probably be up all night if I got into it now.”

“Then you won’t be horribly offended if I take a shower before we get into it?”

“Oh no, a shower. What an insult,” Joseph said sarcastically. He scooted back a bit to give Caesar some space to stand up.

His match got to his feet and started toward the bathroom. Suddenly he paused, turned around to glance at the coffee tale and said, “Damn it, they didn’t give us champagne and strawberries this time.”

Joseph laughed. “How rude.”

“Don’t know how we’ll make it through the night without them,” his match joked as he closed the bathroom door behind him.

Joseph stayed put for a while, listening to the shower run. When he finally grew bored with that, he began to realize that his vest and dress pants felt a tad too restrictive for sitting on a couch. Hopefully, in all the time that Caesar was sure to spend in the shower, he’d forget the conversation that they were about to have and Joseph could just get through the night without another hitch. He stepped into the bedroom to change and that was when he noticed the giant sky-blue vase sitting on the dresser. 

He vaguely remembered having seen it before, and soon realized that it was from the first unit that he and Caesar had shared. On its own, he might not have recognized it at all, but with the bouquet of sunflowers that poked their cheerful yellow heads out of the top, it was unmistakable. He reached out and gently ran his fingers over their petals. They were fakes, scentless and made of plastic and silk; a funny design choice, he thought, but he wasn’t about to critique how the system decided to decorate their place. At least they had let him keep his posters up on the walls. It remained to be seen what Caesar had to say about them, but there would be time enough for that later.

The door swung open without warning as Joseph was pulling a shirt on over his head, and he heard a soft gasp from the doorway. He spun around to see Caesar was there, a towel wrapped around his waist and a slight blush dusting his cheeks. Joseph’s eyes widened and he quickly tugged the shirt down. “S-sorry about that, I didn’t think you’d finish so quickly.”

“I didn’t want to keep you waiting,” Caesar replied, his hands coming down to tug anxiously at the towel. “Um... I-if you don’t mind...”

“Of course, of course.” Joseph moved towards the door just as Caesar started for the dresser, and the two of them briefly ended up in an awkward dance around each other as they both tried to go their separate ways. Joseph stumbled out of the room and back to the couch. This wasn’t even the first time that had happened, and yet it still got to him. 

A second later his match had returned, now with a fleece blanket thrown around his shoulders that Joseph hadn’t seen before. It was the same sky blue as the vase. “Hey,” he pointed out. “You saw the giant vase with the sunflowers, right? Kinda wild that the system would put it in here again.”

“Of course it put it in here,” Caesar replied as he sat down. “It’s my vase.”

“It is?” Joseph inquired. “I had no idea. I thought it was just a random thing they added last time to give our unit some flavor.”

“No, it’s mine. I found it on my first day. I just couldn’t stand how empty my single unit felt. I bought the first thing I saw that I remotely liked, and... well, sunflowers are never a bad touch to add to anything. The fresh ones kept wilting and dying, though, so after a while I just decided to get fakes instead.”

“Nicer to have them around forever, huh?”

Caesar nodded. “That was the idea.”

Joseph wasn’t sure what more there to say. He knew what Caesar had intended talk about with him, but he wasn’t sure anymore that he wanted to bring it up. For months he’d been desperate to complain to someone about how shitty everything in his life had become, but now, the moment the opportunity was there, some unfortunate social reflex had kicked in and he wanted to back out of it. He didn’t know what to say about the matter anymore, and now he was afraid that if he let himself get started, he wouldn’t be able to stop, and he’d end up falling into a deep, dark, resentful hole and Caesar would get dragged down with him. Certainly that was no place to start a new relationship. He stared at his match from his end of the couch, watching anticipation build in his intense green eyes.

“Weren’t we going to talk about something?”

Joseph balked, caught off guard even when he’d been expecting his match to speak up. “Y-yeah, yeah, I was. I just... I don’t know where to start.”

“If you can’t, then can I say something first?”

Joseph nodded, holding his silence.

“Did she not know you’d dated men before?”

He shook his head in response that time. “She insisted we never talk about our romantic or sexual history.”

“So how the hell were you supposed to know what’s worked before and what hasn’t?”

“We didn’t. And it sucked.”

“All those things she called you at the ceremony...”

“Was the first time it happened,” Joseph cut in.

“She hit you.”

There it was, out on the table for both of them to see. Joseph’s breath caught in his throat. He’d been half sure that this particular part would be up to him to explain, and that maybe, possibly, he could just gloss over it and make it sound like nothing had happened. Caesar, however, didn’t seem to be a fan of leaving any stone unturned. 

“I heard her do it,” Caesar went on when Joseph stayed silent. “The side of your face was red when you were walking out. It wasn’t hard to put all the pieces together.”

“She didn’t hurt me that badly. It was just a shock, that was all.” He didn’t know why he was downplaying all of it; he felt guilty, like he was trying to lay all the blame on her for what she did. But maybe that was him, still not quite finished shaking off a year and a half of Colette and her bullshit.

“Had she ever done that before?”

Joseph shrugged. “She threw things sometimes, but that was the worst of it,” he said frankly. “She wasn’t a fan of much that I did. It felt like the more she found out about me, the more she hated me.”

“Homophobic?”

“And sexist. Like a dream housewife of the twentieth century.”

Caesar shook his head and sighed. “How the hell did you get paired with someone like her?”

“Fuck me if I ever figure it out,” Joseph replied.

They were both quiet for a second longer, letting the truth settle around them. Caesar ended up being the one to break the silence. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that,” he teased, a little lightness finally returning to his face. “I’d rather not have to take on a wild goose chase to get that far with you.”

Joseph was slow to realize how hard he was blushing; Caesar stared intently at him, then started to laugh. “Oh my god,” he mumbled in embarrassment, covering his bright red face. “This is the worst time. Don’t you ever stop flirting?”

“Can’t help that it comes so naturally when I’m around you,” his match practically purred.

“I’ll make  _ you _ come naturally,” Joseph shot back, trying to think fast.

Caesar sighed, now looking disappointed. “What are you, thirteen?”

“God, I hope not. I’ve  _ almost  _ started to take a liking to you,” he teased right back. “And I was hoping that sometime we would be able to do something other than talk.

Caesar’s face grew a shade warmer, and Joseph saw him shift his hips against the couch. His eyes stared into Joseph’s, flicked briefly downward, and he noticed his match chewing contemplatively at his lip. Was he considering it? Maybe. To an embarrassing degree, Joseph truly hoped he was.

However, a moment later, Caesar had looked away again. “Sometime?” he said. 

“Could be now, if you like. Or later. Up to you.”

He paused, as if he needed to take a second to think about it. Finally, he sighed and leaned back against the couch, looking even more tired than he’d been at the beginning of their date. “Now that I think about it, I don’t know if I should.”

The silence hung for a moment, making Joseph feel unspeakably awkward. He kept talking, trying to forget how embarrassingly forward he’d been. “What were you up to before our date, anyhow?”

“A one night stand.”

“Oh.” Joseph’s face fell. “Was it at least fun while it lasted?”

“Kind of,” Caesar admitted. “She was into morning sex.”

“She?”

He raised his head and met Joseph’s eyes again. “What? Are you surprised?”

“Um... a little,” Joseph replied. “What with everything you said on our first night, I thought...” He trailed off, no longer really sure what he thought at all.

“You actually remember that?” 

Joseph looked at him, surprised. “Don’t you?” 

He feared, briefly, that the answer was going to be  _ no _ . Instead, Caesar’s face softened and a little smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Every moment.”

A sigh escaped him, and he smiled back. “Me too. I talked about it with everyone who would listen.”

“I really thought you’d be the type to forget stupid things like that.”

“Things are only stupid if you believe they are,” Joseph contested. “Besides, if I’d forgotten, I wouldn’t have found you at the reception.”

Caesar nodded, still smiling. “It was nice to see you again.”

“I’m glad I saw you, too.”

His match glanced away at the clock on the wall, and he followed. It was only around ten, but the drowsy look on Caesar’s face betrayed how tired he was. Joseph wondered just how early Caesar’s last match had woken him up and how hard she had worked him. It couldn’t have been nearly as rigorous as everything he’d done with Suzie the first time they signed off their consent forms. Then again, for all he knew, it might have  _ been _ Suzie. The system could be a small world, and he had no real way of knowing unless he asked.

“You don’t mind if I go to bed, do you? It’s been kind of a long day for me.”

Joseph’s attention snapped back to his match. “Of course,” he said. “I can only imagine.”

“And, um...” Caesar chewed his lip and lowered his eyes, seemingly nervous to say more. “About our sleeping arrangements... Can I be alone tonight? I-I can understand if you’d rather not. It’s just that I haven’t had a quiet night in ages, and-”

“Yes.”

His eyes widened upon hearing Joseph’s quick agreement. “It really doesn’t bother you?”

“Not really. If you’re tired, go on. I’ll take the living room. I’ve been in a single unit for weeks now. Sleeping alone for a few more nights won’t kill me.”

“I feel bad making you give up the bed. The mattresses in those single units really do suck.”

“So the couch is a condition I’m already used to. I told you, Caesar, don’t worry about me.”

“Okay, okay,” Caesar acquiesced, finally getting up off the couch. His steps were oddly slow as he staggered toward the bedroom, and Joseph wasted no time in exploiting his observation. 

“Slow to leave me so soon, Caesar? You can keep worrying over me, if you like. I didn’t mind it.”

Caesar spun back around, grinning. “Fuck off.”

“ _ You _ fuck off.”

He laughed, and so did Joseph. “Goodnight.”

“Buonanotte, principessa.”

“Dio mio, he speaks my language!”

“Barely any. But enough.”

“It’ll take more than that to impress me, Joseph,” Caesar teased him. “Maybe you can practice getting better at seduction while I sleep.”

“Fine. But you’ll be struggling to keep yourself out of my pants tomorrow, because I’ll be a bloody champion.”

“ _ Goodnight _ , stupid,” Caesar said firmly, still unable to keep the laughter out of his voice. He closed the door at last, leaving Joseph to steep in the quiet of the living room.

* * *

 

The first days with Caesar, much like the 18 hours of their first match, were rocky.

One of the first things that Joseph learned about his match was that he was an insatiable perfectionist. He noticed that, on the same day every week, some part of the apartment or another was cleaned. Joseph slowly realized that there was an unspoken schedule, one Caesar was already in that Joseph hadn’t quite sorted out yet; it led to a handful of situations where something got spilled on the bathroom floor just after it was mopped or he decided to make chili on the same day that the stove and countertops had been cleaned, and every one of them ended with a thorough and very emotive tongue-lashing from Caesar.

On top of that, his match was an unbelievably fussy sleeper. They had taken to switching out between having the bed or the couch every few days, and while Joseph could probably sleep through the apocalypse, the slightest noise, change of light or shift in movement could rudely shake Caesar awake; Joseph had learned that lesson the hard way during his match’s first shift sleeping on the couch. Aside from that, he was a morning person most days, the only exception being the days that he wasn’t, on which he seemed loath to drag himself out of bed before 3 in the afternoon. Any disturbance led to an equally impassioned rant, half of which would probably be in Italian.

That was how Joseph additionally learned that Caesar was  _ very  _ vocal when he was displeased. 

It was a breath of fresh air, compared to the weird passive-aggressive silence he’d had to put up with from Colette. By the end of their first week together,  _ stupid _ had become something of a pet name for Joseph; as much as he knew Caesar probably didn’t mean it when he called him that, internally he felt, in a sense, that his match was right. He knew he wasn’t making the same mistakes over and over on purpose, and he was sure that Caesar knew it as well. That was why, two weeks into their match, Joseph started making a list of what got cleaned on what day, so he’d know what to watch out for. Once it was all written down, he took care of cleaning the kitchen while Caesar was out running an errand, then surprised him with an offer to treat him to takeout when he got home.

Caesar was indeed surprised, and pleasantly so. The conversation they had over Indian food from wax paper boxes was an eye-opening one. As it happened, Caesar had needed time to get himself used to the idea of living with Joseph. He’d taken him for the messy type, and he had figured ahead of time that cleaning would probably be left up to him. He didn’t know how Joseph lived when he was alone, and he hadn’t been sure when would be a good time to start pushing chores onto him.

“We could make a list,” Joseph offered. “It was what I did.”

“When?” Caesar asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“All of last week. It’s in my makeup bag, if you ever want to see it.”

Joseph half-expected Caesar to get reactionary over knowing about the makeup, but the offhand mention of it rolled right off. “Making a chore list seems like such a first-grade thing to do though.”

“Then, shit, let’s be first-graders. There are going to be times when you’re going to have to crouch and level with me, Caesarino. This is one of them.”

“Please,  _ never _ call me Caesarino again. You’re only a few inches taller than me.”

“Still enough for you to be my Little Caesar.” He paused, looking across the table with puppy dog eyes. In a nasal falsetto, he added, “Pizza pizza?”

His match snorted, nearly spraying curry through his nose as he tried not to laugh.

“What, don’t you want to be a chain restaurant? Cheapest pizza you’ll find anywhere.”

Caesar coughed, straightening himself out before he said,“Their food tastes like shit. If you’re going to compare me to a franchise, at least pick something good.”

“What’s wrong with being a pizza man, then?”

“Joseph, if anyone is pizza here, it’s you.”

“Why?”

Caesar grinned at him and coyly replied, “The brand is  _ Little Caesar’s _ , isn’t it? And you’re mine.”

It was an opportunistic move, to be sure, but it was a smooth one nonetheless, and the flirtation had hit Joseph like an oncoming truck. In that moment, he had a very vivid mental image of himself lunging across the table and kissing Caesar, right then and there. The consent forms weren’t signed yet, though, so he settled for looking away and holding a piece of naan bread over his mouth. “You beat me at my own game yet again,  _ Caesarino _ ,” he said before taking a bite.

“Fuck off.”

“ _ You _ fuck off.”

They both laughed it off and kept on talking, but the phrase lingered in the back of Joseph’s mind.  _ Fuck off. _ On nights when the couch wasn’t comfortable enough to put him to sleep, he’d laid awake and wondered exactly what that meant between them. It definitely wasn’t what it sounded like, at least not anymore. He hoped it was a term of endearment in some shape or form. Was it some kind if weird permutation of  _ I love you _ , like romance writers were so fond of using in the latest drivel he’d been reading on his tablet? He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he needed an answer, or if he even wanted one.

The night wore on smoothly, and in the little snippets of time where conversation paused and there was a brief taste of quiet, Joseph found himself lost in thought. Something had been bothering him for a while, and he wasn’t yet sure what to make of it: in all of the time they’d spent together, Joseph had begun to notice that an invisible, silent barrier existed between the two of them. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, of course; Caesar had never overtly been cold to him, and they got along well enough when there was nothing to fight about, but at the same time, he feared that whatever was between them wasn’t shaping up to be something that the system would want. He knew that the barrier wasn’t there on its own. They were both working tirelessly to keep it up, as if they knew that if it was ever crossed, it would be a tipping point, one which neither of them were ready to face.

His match stayed up late with him that night, watching an unbroken stream of clunky, badly-edited science fiction films from 1960-something-or-other. He seemed to have gotten curious about them since being matched with Joseph. Halfway through  _ Barbarella _ , he realized that even though the barrier kept them at opposite ends of the couch, their legs met in the middle, and Caesar’s foot had settled snugly against his shin. He was warm. The gentle heat of him made Joseph’s skin tingle; he wanted to feel more of that warmth, more of him, to sit closer just for the sake of being near him. The thought of the unsigned consent form kept him firmly in place. 

At the end of the night, Joseph got up from the couch to let Caesar sleep, since it was in the middle of his shift spending nights in the living room. Before he was out of reach, Caesar grabbed his wrist, forcing Joseph to stop in his tracks. He remembered their parting after their first match, and he shouldn’t have been surprised when Caesar got up and kissed him on the cheek. It didn’t change the fact that he still was very much surprised. Still, without hesitation, Joseph gave his match a kiss as well- on the cheek, just as innocent as the one he’d been given- before leaving for the bedroom. It stayed with him for a while, just as it had the first time; his pounding heart kept him awake in the lonely silence of the bedroom, leaving him to stare at the ceiling until his eyes couldn’t stay open anymore. Eventually, sleep did find him. When he woke up the next morning, he found Caesar snuggled up in bed beside him, having crawled under the covers the night before.

* * *

He didn’t know what they were. They weren’t quite romantic, he didn’t think. Even though they shared a bed, they didn’t do anything in it but sleep and play slumber party games when they had nothing better to do. They went out on dates when their pods asked them to; Caesar was into theatre and poetry, and it meshed with Joseph’s interests in the form of cabaret, burlesque and one live performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His match flirted at every opportunity with anyone and everyone who might have eyes for him, and it usually turned into a game, one that involved one trying to one-up the other and steal the stranger’s interest, then turning their efforts on each other before inevitably going nowhere. One date night after another ended anticlimactically. At least, though, they had gotten to the point of sleeping in the same bed. 

Time seemed to pass differently with Caesar, but Joseph was fairly sure it had been three weeks into their life together when they were assigned to another dinner-date at the same restaurant they’d been sent to for their first match. He took the initiative of ordering the squid-ink pasta this time, knowing that as long as someone did, he and Caesar would end up sharing their plates anyway. Towards the end of dinner, he started wondering out loud where their pods would send them that night, if they were going to be sent anywhere at all.

“Maybe a play. Or a drive-in theater. I’ve never been to one of those,” Caesar mused. Joseph watched his mouth move as he spoke. His cupid-bow lips were stained deep purple from the ink, which Joseph thought was an absolutely gorgeous look on him.

“I haven’t either,” Joseph confessed. “If that’s where tonight ends up, the system had better give us a vehicle. And blankets. I’m not walking to something called a  _ drive-in _ , and like hell am I laying out on a car hood in  _ this _ weather without blankets.”

“Me neither. As long as we don’t get tied up in another burlesque show. I don’t know if I have it in me tonight.”

Joseph raised an eyebrow at him. “Oh? Why is that?”

“It’s draining,” Caesar elaborated. “All the cheering, and the screaming... we both go nuts, even when we say we won’t. Neither of us know when to stop when everyone around us is doing the same thing.”

Joseph scoffed. “You think burlesque is draining? Then you must be a real riot at drag shows. You’d probably be dead in minutes.” 

Unexpectedly, the conversation paused. Caesar looked earnestly across the table at him.  “I’ve never seen one, actually,” he confessed.

At that, Joseph’s eyes widened and he choked on his champagne, narrowly avoiding doing a spit-take all over Caesar. “Wait. Are you serious?”

His match only looked at him and shrugged. “It’s just never come up.”

“You’ve never been to a drag show?” Joseph parroted, louder this time, his voice pitching higher every time he spoke. “You’ve never been? Seriously? Never been to a drag show? Even a single drag show?”

Caesar sank down into the booth. “Joseph, calm down. You’re making a scene.”

Joseph, however, was not calm at all. “How can you even call yourself gay when you’ve never seen a drag show before? That’s the center of gay culture! Drag has been the staple practice and the safehaven of our kind since the dawn of us as a species!”

“Dio mio, you’re certainly passionate about this.”

“Of course I am! Drag was an integral part of my evolution!” Joseph emphatically cried out. “I can’t believe you’ve never been. It’s like... like going to Italy and never tasting the pasta!”

“That seems like kind of a drastic comparison.”

“You know what?” With a tilt of his head, Joseph quickly drained the last of the champagne from his glass and set it down firmly on the table. “Let’s finish dinner and blow this place. We’re going to a drag show tonight.”

Caesar pursed his lips, seeming skeptical. “Joseph, are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“A good idea, you ask? Of course it’s a bloody good idea!”

“But the system didn’t-”

“Screw the system,” Joseph said firmly. Caesar stared at him, pale-faced, as if what he’d just spoken pure blasphemy. “Just for tonight, Caesarino. Let’s not give a fuck about where we’re supposed to be. You have to see this before you can declare that you’ve lived.”

“Do they even have drag shows around here?”

For an answer, Joseph lifted his pod to his mouth and woke it up to speak into the microphone. “Give me a listing of all drag events happening in the city tonight,” he requested.

A little loading animation circled around the screen, then a second later, the results came in. “There are three events taking place tonight, listed in order of proximity to you,” the automated voice proudly announced.

Joseph looked across the table and grinned at Caesar. “We’ll do this Eyes-Wide-Shut style. Run to a costume store, grab something quick and dirty, then crash into one of these places and have the night of our lives. What do you say?”

At first, the man across from him seemed shaken. Gradually, it dissipated, and he began to warm up. A smile found its way onto his face, and he replied, “Let’s do this.”

The two of them bolted down the rest of their food at top speed. There was no waiting for a check on system-commanded dates, so the second their plates were empty, they were off. The two of them practically ran from the restaurant as Caesar hurriedly asked his pod where the nearest costume store was, and they stumbled into a dusty underground shop called  _ Rainbows _ , a comically fitting name for the direction their night had turned. Joseph had a hell of a time sifting through spandex and sequins with the larger sizes, trying to find something that both fit him and actually looked like it made sense on his body. Half an hour later, he stood in front of the dressing room in what must have been an industrial-strength push-up bra, a leotard of pink and purple sequins decorating the cleavage he didn’t really have, and a massive, frilly bustle skirt cinched at the top by a corset. He struggled into hot pink fishnets to finish the look, then turned around, pulled the curtain back and struck a pose. “Look at me, Caesarino. Do you love it, or do you love it?”

Caesar dropped the armful of dresses he was hanging onto and keeled over laughing. “Dolce madre di cazzo!” he wheezed.

Joseph pouted, leaning against the dressing room wall. “Too much?” Caesar was laughing too hard to respond, which he took to be a good sign. “Then it’s perfect.”

After catching his breath, Caesar straightened back up and squeezed into the dressing room next to Joseph, his eyes wandering all over the visual feast that Joseph had made of himself. “Oh my god, this is insane,” he breathlessly remarked. “You’re actually  _ hot _ . How did you make your tits look like that?”

“Practice and padding,” he replied. “Though I’ve been told I need less than most people.”

His hands hovered over Joseph’s redefined chest. “Do you mind if I...”

“Oh, please. Go ahead.”

Caesar nervously bit his lip as he laid his hands over Joseph’s imitation breasts, then gave the padding a careful squeeze. “What the  _ fuck _ .”

“I can do you up like this, too, if you want.”

At long last, Caesar remembered where Joseph’s eyes were. “You could actually... you mean I’m supposed to... I didn’t... H-how am I...” he stuttered, seemingly unable to string together what he actually meant to say.

“It’s not as hard as it looks, really.”

“I... I mean, Joseph... Am I going to be dressing up? On stage?”

Finally, it clicked in Joseph’s head. “What, are you nervous? Everyone has to have a first time sometime.”

“W-when you said a show, I thought you meant we’d be  _ watching _ .”

“Well, with drag, it’s not really so strict, depending on where you’re at, and... well, I was hoping, maybe you and I could...” He trailed off, hoping Caesar would get the point.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to do that. Not when it’s my first time.”

Joseph gazed at him, silent for a moment, hoping quietly that this was just cold feet and he would change his mind. When Caesar said nothing more on the subject, he realized the two of them had hit an impasse and sighed in defeat. “Okay. Well... it won’t bother you if I end up dancing on tables without you tonight, will it?”

At that, Caesar finally smiled. “I expected nothing less.”

Joseph wanted to needle Caesar into at least getting something to dress up with, even something little, just in case he changed his mind later, but is seemed his match had already made his decision. They set out, Joseph’s clothes stowed away in the  _ Rainbows _ bag slung over his arm, along with the fresh palettes of makeup he’d bought while he had the chance. He was wearing the basics that night, but truly summoning the spirit of drag in himself would require a little more than a simulated fresh face.

Music thrummed through the foundations of the building and into the sidewalk as Joseph and Caesar slipped into the line outside the club. He’d been worried that if they showed up late, they might miss something, but clearly that wouldn’t be an issue. The party was already in full swing; all they had to do was pay admission and walk in. It wasn’t covered by the system, so while Caesar was fishing his pod out of his pocket to flash his ID at the bouncer, Joseph subtracted the full admission price from his account credits and sent it to the club, meeting Caesar’s surprised, indignant glare with a satisfied grin. “My treat,” he whispered to his match, earning himself a sigh of defeat and a dispassionate eye roll.

“I’m buying us drinks, then,” Caesar tossed back.

Past the entrance, the whole place seemed to be a blur of life, sound and color. Lights flashed, strangers in all manner of costumes danced together, and the floor trembled along to the Studio Killers song that was blasting from the speakers that lined the walls of the club. Caesar kept his hand tight on Joseph’s wrist as he scouted out the place. After a quick trip to the bathroom for Joseph to finish off his look with bright red lips and heavy mascara, they found a single free spot at the bar, which was just barely safe from the onslaught of random strangers and their drinks in various stages of being finished. They got a pair of tequila shots on Caesar’s insistence, and when the dapper king behind the bar slid them their glasses, Joseph grabbed one of them and held his arm out across Caesar’s. “Hey. There’s something weird I’ve always wanted to try, but I’ve never actually done.”

“Which is?” Caesar asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You know that thing you always see couples doing in movies and on TV and shit like that, where they drink from glasses with their arms all twisted together?”

“You’ve never done that before?”

“It looks fucking impossible!”

“Here, I’ll show you. It’s about the finesse.” Ten seconds later, Caesar’s arm was twined neatly with Joseph’s, holding his tequila shot without having spilled a drop. “Now, just lean in with your head and throw it back.”

“Wait, isn’t there supposed to be salt?”

“Right, there is. Don’t move.” Caesar grabbed a salt shaker from the bar and lapped at the back of his hand before sticking the salt in place. Then, without warning, he did the exact same thing to Joseph. His whole lower body burst into flames as Caesar’s tongue grazed across his skin. Before he could react, his hand had been salted and their arms were twined again, meaning he had to take the shot. He tried and failed to keep it together, and on a momentary impulse, licked the salt off Caesar’s hand and took his shot instead of his own.

His match stared at him at first, then after a second his face flushed red and he went for a retaliation, licking the salt from Joseph's hand and stealing his shot glass between his teeth. Caesar took the shot without using his hands, quickly tilting his head back and swallowing, then snatched the glass in his free hand and slammed it onto the bar, his eyes meeting Joseph's in a challenging glare accompanied by a wicked smile.

“Hey, you licked me twice! That isn't fair!” Joseph protested.

“You stole my salt  _ and _ my shot, so I’d say it's just about even,” Caesar countered. 

The only way to remedy that was to do the shots over again, Joseph decided. They had forgotten the limes, so they hadn't even done their shots properly. He covered the next round, this time taking responsibility for the salt and making a point of licking Caesar's hand in the process. Peals of his match’s beautiful laughter rang in his ears as he did.

Three more shots later, Joseph slammed his glass down on the bar and bit into the wedge of lime Caesar held in front of him, pulling back with his teeth and sucking it dry. He dropped the rind into the glass and held his fist in the air. “Call me JoJo Tequila!” he cried out to whoever was listening.

“Why? Because you've had as much as I have, genius,” Caesar teased, poking a finger at his chest. His cheeks had gotten significantly more pink since walking into the place, looking now almost like he was wearing blush, and Joseph could barely keep it together. Tipsy Caesar was intolerably cute.

“It's my drag name,” Joseph replied, leaning against the bar with his chin in his hand. “Have I never told you my drag name before? God, Caesar, I’m  _ ashamed _ .”

“I didn't ask but I didn't know you had one. Why JoJo Tequila though? Is it because of the shots?”

“It  _ was _ , the first time I used it. I just wanted to sound fun, you know? Like a kind of...” Suddenly, Joseph paused. He heard the opening guitar riffs of a song he thought he recognized.

“Joseph?” Caesar nudged him with the toe of his shoe. “Joseph, you were talking about the name.”

“JoJo Tequila, right? Yeah. I was just... Kinda came up with that on the spot one night... Do you know this song that's playing?”

“I don't really know, it's kinda loud in here.”

_ Love is like a bomb, c’mon baby get it on-  _

“Oh,  _ fuck _ yes, it  _ is _ that song!”

In a second, Joseph had gotten up from his barstool and scooted himself onto the bar, his feet resting where he’d been sitting a second ago. Caesar watched him, a look of vague concern in his hazy eyes. “Joseph, what are you doing?”

“I’m having a moment, Caesar,” he replied. “Every night should have at least one.” With that, he boosted himself up to stand on the bartop, grabbed a hold of the brass pole beside him and started to dance. 

The crowd’s reaction was immediate. People all around were shrieking and cheering. Caesar stared up at him, probably getting a sweet upskirt view from where he was sitting; he looked like he was caught somewhere between shock and overwhelming joy. Joseph- or more accurately, JoJo Tequila- threw himself in with reckless abandon as  _ Pour Some Sugar On Me _ blasted through the club at full volume.

It was probably a miracle that Joseph didn't fall off the bar and break something; he was decidedly not sober, and the heels he’d chosen to wear certainly weren't doing him many favors as he rocked, headbanged and swiveled his hips in time to the music and took full advantage of the pole next to him. When the chorus hit, he crouched down and reached out to Caesar, gazing into his eyes and mouthing the lyrics right at him.

_ “Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love!” _

Caesar’s face practically glowed bright red and he looked almost ready to faint as Joseph stood back up and kept dancing. He took the opportunity to wink at him and blow a kiss down from his stage on the bar. 

Unfortunately it didn’t last much longer, because they same king who’d served them their shots finally caught on to what was happening and made his way over. “Okay, okay, honey, you’ve had your fun. Now get down before someone gets hurt,” he commanded. 

Joseph pouted, but complied anyway. Fortunately Caesar’s arms were waiting for him when he came down, wrapping around him as soon as his stilettos were on solid ground again. “You scared the living shit out of me there,” he said. “I thought you were going to fall.”

“I didn’t,” Joseph confessed. “This isn’t the first time this has happened.”

“I never assumed it was,” Caesar replied, punctuating with a kiss on his match's cheek.

Their seats were still empty, so they took them again while the rest of the song played out and a new one started. Caesar ordered a glass of water to get his head back, and he stared out over the heads of the crowd. Joseph followed his gaze and realized he was looking at the stage, which was scheduled to be overtaken by scheduled performers within the hour. “What are you thinking about?” Joseph asked.

Caesar didn’t speak for a moment, only pensively sipped his water. “Is it bad if I’m having second thoughts?”

“Second thoughts about what?”

“About tonight.”

A dart of disappointment struck Joseph’s heart. “Do you mean you want to leave?” he tentatively asked.

His match shook his head. “No. I mean... I should have just gone for it. I always do this and I’m sick of it.”

“What?” Drunk Joseph was sadly even less perceptive than Sober Joseph, and the intention behind Caesar’s words had gone right over his head.

“I should have let you dress me up when I had the chance. I backed out because I thought I was going to look stupid, but now I’m here and I  _ feel _ stupid, because I never do anything new and never have fun because the same shit gets to me over and over, and I never learn, and now I’m here again and... fuck.” He leaned back against the bar and tilted his head back. “I liked watching you, though. You’re a really good dancer.”

“We can still doll you up,” Joseph offered.

“No, we can’t,” Caesar corrected him. “That place we went to is, like, a million blocks away, and the actual show is starting at nine, and everywhere else that sells costumes is probably closed by now and there’s no way we’d make it back-”

“We don’t have to leave. Here.” Joseph stood up and tugged on Caesar’s arm. “Come on, let’s go backstage.”

“Backstage? Joseph, what the fuck are you thinking? You already got in trouble with the staff once. Anything else and they’ll kick us out before we even get to see the show.”

“No, they won’t. I’ve done this before. It’s how JoJo Tequila was made, and it’s how we’re gonna make you, too.” He looked into Caesar’s eyes again, a faint smile on his face. “Do you want to become a new person tonight or not?”

Caesar hesitated for a second, then let Joseph pull him out of his chair. “Lead me,” he said, looping his arm around JoJo’s corseted waist. “But if we get in trouble, I’m ditching you.”

“We aren’t going to,” Joseph insited as they snuck through the crowd toward a door with a brass star that read  _ STAFF ONLY _ . 

Past that was a narrow hallway punctuated with a velvet curtain, which opened up into a black-painted cinderblock room, lined with mirrors and marquee lights and old floral furniture. The air smelled heavily of hairspray, perfume, face powder and cigarettes; it was certainly a dressing room, if Joseph had ever seen one before. He didn’t take long to get someone’s attention. A olive-skinned queen in kinky black leather with silky red hair was busy making herself up in the vanity mirror right beside the curtain. She looked over at Joseph and her eyes widened a little. “Hey. You were the one dancing on the bar earlier, right?”

Joseph grinned. “Unfortunately, yes,” he replied with a little giggle.

“Oh my god, you look way taller up close,” she said, laughing right along with him. “How did you end up back here?” A second later, she noticed Caesar, and her matte plum lips curved into a smile. “Oh my, and you brought a friend with you. Hello, gorgeous.”

Caesar instinctively dropped into casanova mode. “Hello gorgeous yourself, bellissima. Tell me, is leather the usual look for you? You look absolutely divine in it.”

The queen giggled, putting one stiletto-nailed hand up to her mouth. “Wow, he’s a charmer. Where did you find him and how can I get one?”

“I assure you, beautiful, there’s plenty of me to go around.”

“We’re here on a mission, actually,” Joseph interrupted. “It’s his first drag show, and I wanted to set him up.”

That seemed to catch the attention of everyone present. A handful of the kings, queens and other assorted drag royalty in the room paused and looked over at the entrance. One of them called out, “Hang on, did I hear right? We have a virgin in the room?”

“Hell yes we do!” the queen by the door enthusiastically replied. “He’s getting his cherry popped tonight!”

Caesar looked over at Joseph. “We’re... still just talking about dressing me up, right?”

“Lingo changes from place,” Joseph assured him. 

“Well, if we’re going to be dressing you up, we may as well know your name, handsome,” their host cordially said. “What do you currently go by?”

“Caesar,” his match replied. “But I guess I won’t be for long.”

“Caesar like the salad or the emperor?” a king a few vanities down joked, and there were a few laughs throughout the dressing room, Joseph’s included.

“Call me Rizzo,” the one they’d been talking to said, extending a hand, which Caesar took and kissed, making Rizzo smile again. “Over there is Lexington, that’s Essie, Karmilla, the one with the undercut is Oliver...”

Joseph couldn’t keep track of the names, and a moment later Rizzo had ushered them over toward the dress racks and started picking through the assortment of satin, tulle and sequins. It was easier here to find things that would fit, as opposed to the adventure Joseph had in  _ Rainbows _ , but then again, actual performers had a much more discerning taste than he did. He stayed at Caesar’s side, though he wasn’t sure what purpose he was serving there, since the actual drag royalty in the room seemed to be doing a better job of setting him up than Joseph could ever have hoped to do.

A while had passed, Caesar was in a changing booth, Joseph sitting on a couch and talking to the king he vaguely recalled Rizzo referring to as Lexington, when someone from the bar poked their head in past the curtain and called out, “Curtain in five minutes!”

“Five minutes, thank you!” one of the taller queens with a long indigo weave called back. “Riz, is the virgin still getting dressed?”

“Yeah,” Rizzo replied. “Give him time, Karmie, you can’t just rush through this stuff.”

Not a moment after she said it, the curtain of the changing booth was pushed back, and Caesar stepped out. Dressed up in halter of aquamarine satin, a slinky silhouette that clung to his slightly altered body, finished off with costume diamonds and pearls dripping from his neck, he looked like a vision fresh from an old Hollywood film. From the neck down, anyway. His face and hair were still very much the same sensible Caesar that Joseph knew.

“Oh, look at you!” Rizzo gushed, guiding him out to stand in the middle of the room. “Come on, give us a spin.” Caesar did it with a smile, and the clipping on the floor alerted Joseph to the fact that not only was his match wearing heels, he was shockingly good at walking in them. 

Before anyone could comment, the same employee as before leaned in. “Two minutes!”

“Got it, two minutes!” Rizzo quipped, then turned back to Caesar. “Dammit. We’re not gonna be able to finish him.”

“It’s alright,” Joseph cut in. “I think I can take it from here.”

“You sure? He’s still got a ways to go.”

“I think we’ll be able to manage. Don’t let us delay you. As soon as we’re done in here, we’ll be out in the audience, and I swear we’ll get all this back to you by the end of tonight.”

Rizzo agreed to that, as did everyone else in the room, and they all wished Caesar the best as they scattered from the room to wait in the wings for the beginnings of their acts. Caesar made his way over to the old rose-printed couch where Joseph sat and settled himself down beside him. “So, JoJo Tequila,” he said. “What are you going to do with me now?”

“That depends. What kind of hair are you looking to have?”

“I want this to be a complete look. So pick something that  _ makes sense _ with the rest. I trust you can manage that,” Caesar said, of course never missing a chance to tease him.

A minute later, there was a wavy blonde bob wig standing by on the coffee table, styled with a chunky pearl barrette that would have made Suzie proud. “But before that, we have the most important part,” Joseph said as he helped slide a wig cap onto Caesar’s head.

“More important than the tits?”

Joseph snorted. “Okay, okay. Second most important after the tits.” He picked up the palettes he’d brought from  _ Rainbows _ and set them out on the coffee table, sitting himself right in front of Caesar. “We have to cake your face.”

Caesar looked at the palettes, then Joseph’s theatrical mess of a makeup look. “I don’t know if I should have trusted you with this, JoJo.”

“What, you think this is the only makeup I know how to do?” he tossed back, sounding mildly offended. “This is just JoJo Tequila. She’s a hot mess. It’s who she is, and she’s incomplete without it. That's just her look. It doesn’t have to be yours too.”

“So... what is my look?”

“I was kind of waiting for you to tell me.”

His match sighed, took a second to think, then leaned forward, closed his eyes and surrendered his face to Joseph. “Surprise me.”

The dressing room fell almost silent, save for the faint rhythm of the onstage music outside. Joseph had never done makeup for someone else before. It was more pressure than he’d expected it to be; suddenly, he really,  _ really _ didn’t want to fuck anything up. He was almost afraid to start, but he did anyway, knowing that Caesar was counting on him. If he were thinking about it consciously, he would have realized that he was moving slower than he did when he worked on himself, his movements more careful and deliberate, not letting a single stroke fall out of place. That all came to him by instinct. What consumed his mind more than anything was Caesar, the calm look on his face, his closed eyes.  _ This must be what being trusted feels like _ , he thought to himself as he worked. It was nice, kind of warm and strangely reassuring.

Sharp contours. Rose blush, plus a champagne highlight. Darkened eyebrows. A cut crease on the eyelid, navy blue edges with a glittery white-gold on the inside. A dramatic wing, long and sharp enough to cut a man, because Caesar deserved no less. 

“Open your eyes for a second,” Joseph requested. His match did as he was asked, and he held as still as possible while mascara was rolled onto his eyelashes. They were long already, and god,  _ so pretty _ ... Joseph had to rein his mind in to keep it on track. He had to finish this before they missed too many of the acts that night.

“Okay, just one more thing...” Joseph turned away briefly to reach for the small assortment of lip colors he had on hand. When he turned back, he saw that Caesar had closed his eyes again. “You don’t have to keep your eyes closed, you know.”

“I want to,” Caesar frankly replied. “I like the suspense.”

“Whatever you say, principessa,” Joseph teased as he cracked one of the tubes open.

“I told you not to call me that.”

“And I told you that you didn’t have to close your eyes.”

Caesar laughed, keeping his eyes firmly shut. “Fuck off.”

“ _ You _ fuck off,” Joseph tossed back with a smile his match couldn’t see. He leaned in again and started to carefully trace the wand of a shimmering bubblegum pink along the outline of Caesar’s lips. He moved carefully, trying not to smear it, closely watching the movement of his fingers. Or maybe just staring at Caesar’s lips. He could hardly tell the difference right then; he was still mostly drunk, feelings he couldn’t identify were brewing in his chest, and  _ Caesar’s lips are just so nice, they’re so fucking perfect... _

Joseph didn’t realize until he’d finished that his hand was trembling. He quickly pulled the gloss away from his match’s face. He turned, grabbed the wig from the table and quickly pinned it into Caesar’s hair. “There,” he said, a satisfied smile on his face. “That’s a look.”

Caesar opened his eyes and Joseph got him up from the couch to turn him toward one of the mirrors. The second Caesar was facing himself, his eyes widened like cue balls and he let slip a little gasp. He slowly walked toward the mirror, then leaned in, raising one hand to his face as if to make sure it really was him that he was looking at. “Porca troia...” he murmured in awe.

“Magnificent, right?”

“I... I don’t even recognize myself,” Caesar replied. “Dio mio, I’m fucking  _ sexy _ .”

“Of course, most of it is just your face. All I did was paint on it a little.”

Caesar spun around, smirking at him at first, then his face broke out in a full-blown smile. “Never missing a chance to beat me at the flirting game, are you?”

“Whoever said it was a game?”

His match blushed and looked away. “God, Joseph, you’re shameless.”

“And that’s exactly how I got you into a wig and a dress, Caesarino. By the way, we’ll need something to call you other than that.”

“I’m getting a stage name too?”

“Of course. I mean, unless you just want this to be your look for the rest of your life, which we can probably manage, if we really try.”

Caesar laughed again, giving Joseph’s arm a playful shove. “Hell no. I’d be too sexy to find anyone attractive ever again. I’d end up like Narcissus, and where the hell would that leave you?” he joked. “How do I even go about picking a drag name, anyway?”

“It’s not too complicated. And it doesn’t have to be the same one forever,” Joseph assured him. “We’ll just throw one together for tonight and see if it sticks. Look at yourself. What’s the first name that hits you?”

“Honestly? Lana Del Rey.”

“Too bad she already exists,” he teased. “Take it again. We’re getting somewhere.”

“Um...” Caesar pursed his lips while he thought. “Portia? She seems like a Portia.”

“Portia is nice,” Joseph agreed. “It’s classy. Kind of refined. Do you want to leave it at that?”

His match thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No. It feels kind of incomplete.”

“So you need a surname. Okay, what’s something that-”

“Versace.”

Joseph cocked his head. “What?”

“I’m calling her Portia Versace,” Caesar said, turning to Joseph with a wicked smile. “She’s an attention whore... and a spoiled brat. She’s just here looking for her next sugar daddy.”

Joseph’s eyes widened. “Wow. That really took off.”

“I just needed a good place to start,” Caesar responded with a shrug.

“Well, she’s beautiful.” Joseph reached for a hairspray can, shook it up and sprayed it in an arc, circling the mist like a halo over Caesar’s head. “I hereby christen you... Portia Versace.”

Caesar quickly ducked out of the way of the falling hairspray and took Joseph by the arm. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. We’re missing the show.”

* * *

By the time they got back, most people had abandoned their seats and had crowded into the standing room near the foot of the stage. The two of them squeezed their way in, and Caesar looked up in awe at the kaleidoscopic spectacle that was Karmilla’s performance. The whole audience around them was in a shrieking frenzy, and in no time at all, they were swept up in it as well. Caesar had been right before; neither he nor Joseph could control themselves in a crowd. They screamed their lungs out for one performer after another as each went up onstage and gave it their all for the spectators below. 

Then Rizzo was being featured, something that had to do with a chair and a riding crop and some fuzzy pink handcuffs, and after her opening song ended, she shouted out into the crowd that she “needed volunteers.” Then, upon seeing how many hands had been raised, she announced with a sly smile that they had a virgin in the room that night. She singled out Portia, and JoJo scooted her forward and pushed her up onto the stage. A second later, Rizzo had pointed out that Portia had a “little girlfriend” she’d brought with her, and JoJo was being pulled up on the stage as well. Rizzo then threw up her hands and declared, “It’s war between you now, ladies. Time to lip-synch for your life!”

Something that sounded like Lady Gaga was blasting from the speakers, and JoJo didn’t know the song, but she let it take her away anyway, fumbling for the lyrics as they both played along. Portia bounced off of her every move, seeming just a little better aware of herself than JoJo. The crowd was cheering, and it could have been for any of them, but the way Caesar moved as Portia, he seemed to know that it was for him. JoJo had experience, but Portia had finesse. He was all too aware of how pretty he was, and if the people wanted him, he would give them as much as they could handle. At the end of the song, Rizzo called off the match and shouted to the bartender, “Do we really need to pick a winner, or can we just give them both the free drink?”

At the very end, Rizzo invited even more of the audience up on the stage, and a new song started to play. Joseph pulled Caesar closer, Portia played off of JoJo without hesitation, and they corresponded to each other as if by magic, moving together like clockwork. In the tight space of the stage, they were pushed close together and Portia’s warm, callused hands were all over JoJo, the two of them still half-drunk and mindlessly dancing together and the audience was joining in. It was all a blur of cheering and music and endorphins, and Joseph barely knew what was happening, but he loved every second of it and didn’t want it to end.

But the end still came, as Rizzo confessed that her act was the last one of the night, and one by one she thanked everyone who had come up on stage with her. She congratulated Portia on losing her drag virginity, and she waved and blew kisses at the audience when Rizzo shouted out her name to them and the crowd exploded in praise. Caesar- now Portia Versace, for the evening or forever- posed for them and put on a whole little ten-second show while the cheering rang out and shook the foundations of the building. They stumbled off the stage with Rizzo when the show ended, she hugged them both and kissed Caesar on his cheeks to congratulate him one more time. From then on everything was one big cloud of happy confusion. The drag performers mingled with the crowd, and Caesar was there, and maybe someone had bought them another round of drinks, but Joseph wasn’t totally sure.

The sun was just starting to rise by the time they finally left the club and started heading toward their unit. They’d probably be sleeping for the next few days until their circadian rhythms reset, or at least until the system told them to get out and do something else. Joseph couldn’t be bothered with plans right then. Caesar reluctantly returned his costume to the dressing room and went home in his own clothes, but he kept the full face of makeup, only taking it off once he was sure that Joseph had taken some decent pictures of him so they could recreate the look sometime. 

He still had traces of eyeliner on when he came out of the shower, and Joseph pointed out that it made the green in his eyes pop, and maybe he should do it more often. Caesar just laughed it off and said he’d think about it, then fell into bed. Not much later, Joseph joined him. He thought his match was asleep, but realized he was wrong when Caesar cuddled up next to him, nuzzled his face into his chest and said something about how warm his hands were, and how that night was probably the most fun he’d ever had in his life. Joseph responded by burying his face in Caesar’s hair and wrapping his arms around him, and they passed out together in a hungover pile. When Joseph woke up at almost noon the next day, nothing had changed. He nestled his head back down into the pillows and closed his eyes again, drifting off in the feeling of his match’s body pressed against his own.

* * *

The day after the drag show saw Joseph filled with a warm, fuzzy, weirdly pleasant confusion. Maybe it was the afterglow of the night before, but he could have sworn that whatever was between him and Caesar had started to make his head spin. His match had taken the initiative of making them both coffee at two in the afternoon when they finally dragged themselves out of bed. Still, they didn’t leave their unit for the rest of the day; they stayed in the living room with hot drinks and the vast selection B-grade horror movies that the system had in stock. It seemed like the past night had taken all of Caesar’s inhibitions away, and he had no qualms about sprawling himself out directly on top of Joseph while they lounged on the couch. 

As pleasant as all of it was, Joseph couldn’t help wondering what else they could have been doing with all that time they were stuck at home.

He couldn’t recall quite how long they’d been together. It was hard to keep track of that when the days weren’t being counted down for him. A month, possibly, or maybe a little more? He had no idea, and frankly, he was afraid to ask his pod outright; he was unable to shake the fear that it would be a trigger to some serious consequence he wasn’t aware of. Maybe he and Caesar didn’t have an expiration date because they hadn’t asked to be given one. That would have been ideal, Joseph thought; for the first time, a match seemed to be getting better over time instead of gradually falling apart. But as nice as that was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t going to last.

Joseph couldn’t hide the truth from himself. He was scared. The memory of their first 18-hour match lingered in his mind like a sewing needle lost in a carpet, just waiting to rear up again and stab him when he was least expecting it. He’d seen things end suddenly once before. Now he felt positively haunted by the feeling that he was running out of time, and there seemed no way to fix it.

The idea came to him three days later in the form of an outing. First a run through the park (his choice, because he’d made a sport of disappearing on Caesar and chasing him through the trees), then visiting one of the system’s pools for a swim (Caesar’s choice, because he was fond of swimming and liked the ambiance). Their mutual favorite was a densely forested park with winding paths and a complex at its center that was tiled with reflective glass, with a vast mosaic of sea life covering one wall like an ancient byzantine mural. An image of a inky-spotted octopus was emblazoned at the center, its long, reaching arms extending across the wall, framing everything else in the image into little subsections. Caesar once said it looked like it was organizing everything, like some kind of octo-taxonomist.

That day, Joseph surfaced from the depths as he was facing it, having noticed once again that there were lights embedded in the sides of the pool. He ducked down again and launched himself off the wall to catch up with his match, who was swimming laps. “Caesar, what time does this place close?”

Caesar stopped to catch his breath and grabbed onto the edge beside him. “Eight, I think. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering something.” He floated up on his back and drifted lazily around Caesar. “I’ve never seen this place without the overheads on.”

“Weird thing to mention.”

“Do you think they ever use those ones in the sides of the pool?”

“You mean without the overheads?”

“If they put them on  _ with _ the overheads, there wouldn’t be any point. You wouldn’t even be able to tell they’re on.”

“Probably not, then. If they ever did, I think it might be considered a safety hazard or something.”

Joseph swam around for a bit longer while Caesar floated with him, finally having taken a break from laps. “It probably looks really lovely in here with them on. Especially with that mural.”

“The reflections would probably make it look like a living thing,” Caesar agreed. “Too bad they lock everyone out at night.”

A moment passed quietly as Joseph went under, then surfaced right beside Caesar’s head. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to pick a lock, would you?”

Caesar huffed, not even surprised by Joseph’s sudden appearance. “You’re not seriously asking me that question, right?”

“And why not?” Joseph asked. “I’ve done this before, and I managed to pull it off without getting caught. I know for a fact I can do it again.”

“Listen, Joseph.” Caesar turned himself upright again and faced his match. “We’ve already ditched a system date once. I don’t know how much nonsense they tolerate here. If we push it too far, we’re going to end up getting in trouble.”

“How?” he countered. “In all the time you’ve been here, have you seen any actual security enforcement? To be honest, I don’t even know if there is any. I’m half sure that this whole place is just a free-for-all and they’re trusting us not to do anything too drastic.”

“It’s called  _ the system _ for a reason. The whole city is being constantly monitored. If we’re somewhere we aren’t supposed to be, they’ll know.”

“And what’ll they know? That we broke into a pool to go swimming? It’s not like we’re gonna burn the place down.”

Right that second, he thought he saw Caesar’s expression soften a bit, and he knew he must have been getting through to him somehow. “I don't know...” Caesar mumbled, still playing at being unsure. “I think it’s kind of risky. The drag show was one thing, but this?”

“If the system knows our intentions are pure, maybe it won’t mind so much.”

That got a giggle out of Caesar. “What kind of pure intentions do you mean?”

“If we don’t come back here and try it, I guess that you’ll just never find out.”

At long last, his match slid down off the wall and circled around in front of him. “You are full of so many questionable ideas, JoJo,” he teased. “But I won’t lie and tell you that I’m not intrigued.”

Joseph’s lips pulled into a smile. “You’ve never called me JoJo before.”

“There’s never a bad time to start,” Caesar replied. He then popped his index finger on the end of Joseph’s nose with a cheerful “Boop!” before sinking down under the water and swimming away, leaving his match to chase after him.

* * *

 

The rest of the day was calm, and so was the next one. The two of them were set up on one more date, which was short and uneventful. The sun set, and at around 10, Joseph snuck up on Caesar and told him that if they were going to go through with their plan, there was really no better time than the present. His match readily agreed, and the two of them dressed up in black and headed out.

Getting to the location was the easy part. The city’s metro system never stopped running, and within half an hour, they were standing outside the pool complex. It resided at the center of the district with all the parks, and it was usually quiet there at night. As Joseph had predicted, no one was around to see them hop the fence at the back of the building and sneak up to the staff entrance, which was locked with a six-digit security code. Worn down numbers tipped Joseph off to what that might be, and he guessed it on the third try, much to Caesar’s surprise. Once inside, they found the panel of labeled light switches in the lifeguard office. Joseph turned on the ones for the underwater lights, then Caesar took care of picking the lock with a swiss army knife to actually get them into the pool area. He went ahead and stepped in first, then gasped and stopped in his tracks. “Dio mio...” he whispered.

“What is it?” Joseph asked, coming up behind him to see what the commotion was, then he froze as well when he finally saw. The vast room was empty and silent like Joseph had never seen it before, and walking past the doorway felt like stepping into another world. The pool lights were on, just as he’d been hoping they would be, and the entire space was cast in a rippling blue glow. It reflected off the tiles and turned the space into something cut out from the ocean itself. He turned toward the mural, and the vision that greeted him was everything he’d hoped it would be; the expansive image seemed to flex and waver, like living things floating in the current of the ocean. At times he’d wondered what aquarium fish felt like, living in little closed spaces with things from another world lurking right outside and watching them, and he figured this was as close a comparison as he could get. 

Caesar was crouched by the glowing water, extending a hand to run his fingertips through it. “It’s so beautiful,” he remarked. “It looks like it’s gotten magical properties or something. If I jump in, I’m going to turn into a merman.”

Joseph giggled. “Now that would certainly make for an interesting turn of events.”

“It feels colder than it usually does. They probably turn the heaters off at night.”

“Because they don’t expect anyone to be here,” Joseph agreed. “This doesn’t mean that you’re backing out now, does it, principessa?” He glanced over at his match, smirking.

“Of course not,” he tossed back as he stood up again. “You think a little cold is going to make me change my mind? What kind of coward do you think I am?” With that, his hands went to the hem of his shirt, and Joseph’s pulse quickened as he watched Caesar lift the garment over his head and throw it to the floor. His eyes drank in the sight of his toned, graceful body, admiring him like the impeccably carved marble statue that he was, and he did his best to ignore the impulse he felt hitting him right in the crotch. He shed his clothes as well, wondering if, maybe, the sight of him would do the same thing to Caesar. It wasn’t likely, but he could hope.

When he finally met his match’s gaze again, he found that Caesar’s eyes had already been on him for quite some time. His gaze was searching, like he had a question, and he saw his match absentmindedly biting his lip. “Are you okay?” he asked Joseph. “You seem nervous.”

“I’m not,” Joseph quickly replied. “Just weird being here without any people. And I don’t think the water is really as cold as you say it is.” He knew he was talking too fast and giving himself away, so before Caesar had a chance to point anything else out, he kicked his clothes away from the pool’s edge and jumped in. 

The water rushed up around him, and he quickly realized that he should have listened to Caesar. It wasn’t icy, but it certainly wasn’t the pleasant lukewarm temperature he was used to, either. He kicked his way back to the surface, gasped as his head breached into the air, and shouted, “Fuck, it’s freezing!”

Caesar laughed at him from his spot on the sidelines. “What did I tell you?”

“F-fuck off.”

“Only if you do first.” 

Joseph watched his match dive in, his shapely body launching forward in a graceful arc before plunging in hands-first. He sliced through the water like a knife, swimming in a circle around the Joseph before finally coming back up for air on the other side of the pool. Joseph went down and followed him, breaching the surface just behind him and sending a wave of water splashing over his head. Caesar cried out in surprise, laughed, then retaliated, and the two of them started splash-fighting each other until Joseph refused to keep it going, ducked under and tackled Caesar, dragging the both of them underwater.

He tried to hold on while his match squirmed to get free, but he couldn’t keep him, and he eventually had to let go. They went on for what felt like hours, splashing and screaming and trying to drag each other under the water, and the entire time Joseph couldn’t seem to stop smiling. In that moment, he felt almost like he’d stepped out of reality; the world outside was dark and quiet, and in that room there was only the two of them, swimming around in the glowing blue pool with the shimmering walls. Caesar in front of him, at his side, warm and inviting and fearless and beautiful.

And then they were floating beside each other, exhausted, looking up at the clear glass ceiling of the complex. The night sky showed through, smattered with stars and the fingernail crescent of the moon gazing benevolently down on them. Joseph watched their shadows circle around each other in the faint reflection of the pool below. 

“JoJo?” Caesar asked softly, like he wasn’t sure if his match was listening.

“Yeah?” Joseph was listening, and very intently.

“What are you thinking about?”

There were a lot of things he was thinking about. One was that he and Caesar were in a dark, beautiful space, half-dressed, within touching distance of each other, and if he could reach his pod from where he was, the consent form would be a thing of the past. But that wasn’t something he thought Caesar needed to hear right then. “I’m trying to decide what I can see clearer, the constellations or the two of us.”

“You’ve been watching our reflection too?”

Joseph couldn’t stop himself from turning upright and looking toward Caesar. “I thought you were watching the stars.”

“They’re both in the same direction,” Caesar replied, still on his back. “Although you’re a lot harder to see now that you’re not floating.”

“Do you want me to turn back over?”

“No. Just hold still.” Caesar’s feet pedaled him through the water and he reached for Joseph, his hand wrapping around his arm. “There. I just didn’t want to lose track of you.”

“I can’t be that hard to keep track of. We’re the only two people in here.”

“I know. I was just...” Caesar let the sentence trail off and disappear. He looked up at the ceiling and sighed. He was biting his lip again, making the faint little dent that Joseph had come to recognize in the perfect bow of his lower lip, and there seemed to be something deep in him, beyond the words he spoke out loud, that just couldn’t be put to rest.

“Is something wrong?”

Caesar blinked, and his eyes looked glassy in the reflection of the blue lights. “I was watching us circle around each other, and it reminded me of those artistic recreations of asteroids that have a near miss with a planet. The ones where they almost collide but never do. And we were just there, among the stars. Always close, but never really quite close enough to crash. I didn’t really know what to make of it all, but once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t seem to stop.”

Joseph looked at him pensively for a moment, biting his tongue, words bubbling up in him but unable to make enough sense to speak out loud. He’d been thinking almost the exact same thing. Less cosmic, certainly less poetic, but that seemed to be just the way that he operated. He gazed at Caesar, his eyes closed now, looking like a floating Ophelia at peace with her dim, uncertain fate. But that wasn’t how he wanted this night to end.

Carefully, he eased himself closer, reaching out to Caesar and cradling him to his chest. His match melted against him, letting Joseph hold him there, feeling the heat of his skin, his body curved against the rippled surface of the water. His eyes opened and met Joseph’s, and his heart skipped a beat. “Do you want us to crash?” Joseph asked.

Caesar didn’t say a word. His hand came up, and Joseph nuzzled his cheek to his match’s palm. He watched his graceful body curl up and rise from the water. Their faces were so close, and he could feel the warmth of Caesar’s breath ghosting across his skin. He leaned in, letting his eyes flutter closed-

Somewhere, the mechanical clanking of a door being opened broke the stillness. Both of them abruptly let go and spun around towards the source of the noise. “Shit!” Joseph said in a harsh whisper. “Go, go!”

They left the pool in a rush, flashlight beams sweeping the floor just a few feet behind them. Then it was on to sprinting through the park, barefoot, their clothes and shoes bundled up in the backpack Joseph had brought. It was cold, but they were laughing anyway, barely able to stifle it in the rush of adrenaline as they desperately tried to outrun whoever was behind them. They got to the edge of the property, hid in a clutch of trees as they hastily pulled their clothes back on, then it was another dead sprint to the metro, catching their breath on the ride and realizing they’d accidentally swapped shirts, and finally laughing about it as they walked back to their unit.

“You know,” Caesar said as they stumbled together down the street, “while we were in there, I realized something.”

“What was that? That I probably almost got us arrested and you should never listen to me again?” Joseph replied.

He laughed, and Joseph resolutely decided that it was the best sound he’d ever heard. “Okay, you’re not wrong there. But that wasn’t everything. I realized that I’ve never really known how to describe the color of your eyes.”

“Really? I always just called them blue.”

“They aren’t, though. They have all these undertones to them, and they’re so clear. I’ve spent ages trying to figure out the right name for them, because whenever I told anyone about you, I could never seem to get it right.”

Joseph looked over at him, surprised. “I didn’t know you thought about it that much.”

“I did. Too much, probably,” Caesar confessed. “I’d settled on teal for a while, but they’re brighter than that. There’s just something to them. At the pool, while I was swimming with you, and the lights were on in the water, I realized... that’s what it is. They glow.”

“My eyes?”

“And the pool. But it kind of took seeing them both at once to really make it stick.”

A little smile tugged at Joseph’s lips. “Well, I’m glad that at least something good came out of this. We’re probably going to be banned from that complex now. I should apologize for that in advance, because there’s no way in hell they won’t know it was us who broke in.”

“I did warn you,” Caesar teased him. “But I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Just getting to be there tonight was worth it.”

“You really think so?”

“Of course I do.” Caesar pulled on his arm, stopping him. He then came up on his toes and kissed Joseph’s cheek. “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

Joseph froze, his eyes wide, as Caesar stood before him. His match had done this so many times before. He should have been expecting it. Still, something in him had stalled this time, and before he could think, the words were spilling out of him. “Caesar, can you do that again?”

Caesar laughed, and the burning under Joseph’s skin assured him that he was blushing harder than he ever had. That didn’t keep his match from leaning in again, turning to plant another one on his cheek. Joseph quickly put a hand to Caesar’s chest, stopping him, and the joking expression faded from his face. His match stared at him, seeming confused, until Joseph fished his pod out of his pocket and pressed his thumb to the screen. It chimed, confirming that the consent form was signed.

That, of all things, seemed to take Caesar off-guard, judging by the way he stared at Joseph. “You... you waited until now?” he murmured.

Joseph nodded, feeling too vulnerable to say anything else.

“Why?’

“I... I thought you hadn’t signed yours yet either.”

“I had,” his match corrected him. “I signed it the night I found out I’d matched with you again.” He sighed, biting his lip like he always did at times like these. “I know I turned you down then, even though I’d signed already, but... I didn’t expect it to last this long.”

Right then, Joseph felt more oblivious than he ever had before. All this time, while he’d been pacing himself, holding back and wasting his time, Caesar had been waiting for him. He’d never been so stupid before in his life. He wanted to voice the crushing guilt he felt, but all that came out of his mouth was a small, pitiful “Oh.”

A smile curved Caesar’s perfect lips, making Joseph’s heart flutter. “You’re sure you know what you’re getting into now?”

“I think so.”

Not another second was wasted. Caesar leaned in and pressed Joseph’s lips to his own.

His kiss was soft when it started. He was gentle, tasted warm and smooth; his lips were delicate and dextrous, his mouth inviting, and before Joseph could stop himself, his hands were at Caesar’s waist, pulling him closer, and his match’s hands were clutching at his shoulders, their heads angled into a deep, feverish kiss. Caesar had been desperate, so much that Joseph could almost taste it, and it only got more heated when he felt his back pushed up against a brick wall, his match’s lips parting against his to taste him, the fingers of one hand tangling into his hair and dragging him in deeper, begging for more.

Joseph gave in willingly, Caesar’s hunger mirroring his own, clutching at the back of his shirt as he let his tongue slip into his match’s mouth. It didn’t stop, not for a second, and the whole world seemed to pass by them in a blur; the rest of the way down the street, the lobby, the elevator, then they were stumbling into their apartment, totally lost. Caesar’s legs gave out against the arm of the couch and he toppled over backwards, Joseph landing on top of him. His lips moved down from his mouth and latched onto his match’s neck, then his collarbones and chest, and Caesar’s body heaved and shuddered under him as he moaned, digging his fingers into Joseph’s hair. He slipped his hands under the hem of Caesar’s shirt and pulled it away, running his fingers over his body’s tight, corded muscles before going in to explore them with his lips and tongue. 

His match whimpered softly when Joseph’s hand slipped up between his legs; he was hard,  _ god _ he was so hard, he wanted him so badly, and Joseph could think of little else to do but shed his own shirt and toss it to the floor before tugging at Caesar’s pants and sliding his hand in between fabric and skin. It elicited a breathless whine from the man underneath him, then a small litany of whispers. “Yes...  _ dio mio _ , yes, please... please...”

He hadn’t needed to plead for it. Joseph’s mouth was already working on him, his tongue flicking at the hot, slippery head of his match’s cock and his lips running over the shaft, taking him in as deep as he would go, sucking until he felt a hot stream of cum spilling into his mouth, nearly choking him as Caesar’s hips bucked erratically against him and his match came with a jolt and a cry of ecstasy that the hand over his mouth did nothing to muffle. Joseph clung to his hips, licking up the last of his release before slowly coming back up to his neck. Caesar’s legs wrapped around his waist, and for once he didn’t seem to care how clean things were, because he took Joseph’s head in both his hands and kissed him again, hard and fast and desperate. 

“I want you,” he whispered. “I have for so long.”

“You have no idea,” Joseph breathlessly replied.

The last of their clothes came off easily. Joseph lifted Caesar off the couch and carried him to their room, laid him back and began to work him over again, when suddenly he was being rolled on his back and his match had taken control, leaving Joseph able to do little else but thrash, moan and clutch at the bedcovers while Caesar deconstructed him with his hands and mouth. His skin drenched with sweat, his eyes hazy and unfocused, his tongue unable to string together a sentence of more than a few words, he watched Caesar sit back on his heels, one gloved hand with three fingers still inside him, the other coming up to wipe the traces of a messy climax from his bitten, blushing lips.

“Take me,” Joseph begged. 

Caesar did. And when it was over, Joseph returned the favor. By the time it all ended, it was nearly dawn, and the bedroom was pervaded by the hot, heavy scent of sweat and chlorine. They were still tangled up in each other as they watched the sun rise outside, then Joseph limped to the bathroom to finally clean up, and Caesar joined him a moment later, ending in one last round for the both of them before their exhaustion finally set in. 

Joseph’s eyes were closed before his head even hit the pillow. He didn’t move when Caesar pulled the stained bedspread out from under him, leaving it on the floor to get washed later. He brought in the fluffy throw from the living room, and Joseph’s eyes fluttered a little when he felt the mattress dip from Caesar’s weight as his match settled in next to him. He roused himself just long enough to catch a glimpse of those astoundingly green eyes gazing into his own before sleep caught up to him and his vision went dark. A pair of arms wrapped around him and legs intertwined with his own, and warm, callused hands ran through his hair and down his back as he drifted away.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You wanted it. And I delivered.  
> See you next chapter.   
> :3 c


	6. Caesar, part III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.  
> While my garbagey little laptop struggles to keep up, I post this chapter in the naive hopes it will be read by human eyes.  
> It's been a long semester and I realize I missed last week's update. I'm balls deep in art school finals right now and only finished all my project works yesterday. I was barely able to keep my eyes open last week, so there was no way in hell that I would have been able to post it in its entirety. And yes, I will say it now, this is going to be another ridiculously long one.  
> I've spent a lot of time being stressed out, angry and tired. Because Tumblr is getting fucked in the painfully near future, I figure I should probably direct whoever wants to keep up with me to some other resource, though I honestly don't know where to direct you, because I'll be frank, I don't want any of you to see my face or find out what my name is as long as I fucking live. If I end up publishing something that isn't fanfiction someday and I actually gain some fame and make a living as a writer....... maybe, but you're still on thin fucking ice.   
> I'm not sure what else to add that's contextually appropriate, and there is going to be a FUCK TON of text that proceeds from this author note. Also this chapter is the one with a threesome in it. You'll know it when you see it. There's a reason I put "threesome" in the tags.  
> I'm thanking Jasmine and cicada_s again for enabling me in writing all this garbage I keep vending to you. Also thanks to the 3 whole people who've left comments on every chapter I've posted. I crave that sweet sweet validation.  
> CONTENT WARNING for alcohol use, a WAY TOO DESCRIPTIVE sex scene, and quite a bit of dishonesty.  
> Let's move the fuck on now. Shit's going to be intense.

 

When Joseph woke up, it was already sometime in the afternoon, and his whole body hurt. Between swimming and running for his life, then all the things he’d done with Caesar and all the things that Caesar had done with him that he couldn’t even begin to take stock of, he had reason to be tired. His match had left the bed, and he heard the distinct sound of the kettle whistling in the kitchen.

He raised his head from the pillow, looked around, then quickly gave up on trying to get out of bed and let himself crash back down.  _ Where’s Caesar? _ he wondered silently as he stared at the bedroom door, which had been left slightly open. He hoped that he hadn’t gotten bored with him and left. Would Caesar be surprised if he found out that Joseph liked to be cuddled after sex? He thought back to the conversation they’d had on their first date, back when Caesar had accused him of being a player.  _ Maybe he thinks I’m used to waking up alone _ , he thought.

It wouldn’t be long before he’d have a chance to get an answer. A moment later, Caesar had appeared in the doorway. He was holding a steaming mug of something, and he noticed that Joseph had stirred from the position he’d left him in. A smile crossed his face, and he let out a light giggle. “Sorry. I got hungry,” he said. He then made his way toward the bed and sat down beside his match, setting the mug on the bedside table and opting instead to comb his fingers through Joseph’s hair. “Good afternoon, sleepyhead. It’s four goddamn PM. You really ran yourself into the ground last night, didn’t you?”

Instead of replying, Joseph looked sleepily up at him, blinked a few times to clear his vision, then wrapped his arms around Caesar’s hips and snuggled up against him, nuzzling his face into his thigh. He groaned and closed his eyes again, hugging his match tight.

“You missed me that much, huh?” Caesar asked, not expecting an answer this time. “Well, color me flattered, JoJo.” He was quiet for a while, ruffling and stroking Joseph’s hair, leaning away only once to grab his mug from the nightstand and take a sip of the contents. “Are you feeling okay?” he finally asked after a few minutes had passed.

Joseph nodded and let out another muffled whine.

“You’re not doing a very good job of convincing me.”

He turned his head and looked up at Caesar, his lips pouting a little. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I feel... I feel weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Weird in every sense of the word.” Joseph sighed deeply and scooted himself up a little further so he was almost sitting upright. “What are you drinking?”

“Peppermint. You’re welcome to it if you want some,” Caesar replied, lowering the mug to Joseph. “I figured that since we have an entire fucking  _ drawer _ devoted to different boxes of tea, I may as well try some myself.”

“Hey. Don’t make fun of my tea,” Joseph whined.

“Oh, relax. It’s not like I’m dumping it in Boston Harbor.” His match smiled before taking another sip.

“Do you like it, at least?”

“It’s not bad. Weak, but not bad.”

“That’s because you’re supposed to steep it, wanker. It doesn’t just come out finished like your hot bean juice does. Tea needs patience.”

“You think I don’t have patience? After last night, I’d have to disagree.” Caesar set the mug aside for a second, pulled Joseph upright and offered it to him. “Here, have some. You haven’t eaten since last night. You’re probably either dehydrated or low on blood sugar.”

Joseph cautiously took the mug from Caesar and took a deep breath of the tea’s scent. It was creamy and sweet; Joseph didn’t usually put milk or sugar into tea, but he probably should have expected that from a coffee-cocktail-drinker. He brought his lips to the edge and took a long, greedy sip. 

“Better?” Caesar asked when he had finished, to which Joseph nodded. His match laughed. “Probably dehydration, then. You came  _ a lot _ last night.”

“Oh, don’t give yourself so much credit,” Joseph groaned in mock exasperation, unable to hide the smile on his face.

“I don’t dictate what your balls do when I touch them. If they want to drown me with semen, that decision between them and your cock.”

“I think that might be the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“I can say much worse, believe me,” Caesar tossed back, a wicked grin on his face.

Joseph sank back down into the pillows. “Please don’t test that theory.”

“I won’t,” his match promised. He drained what was left of the tea and set the mug on the bedside table again before cozying himself up next to Joseph. “I was meaning to ask you what you wanted for dinner. If we want to cook something, we should probably get to it sooner rather than later.”

“Um...” For a solid few seconds, Joseph couldn’t think of a response. All that ran through his head was  _ Why is he taking such close care of me? _ Eventually, his stomach got tired of waiting for him to make up his mind and growled loud enough for both him and Caesar to hear.

Caesar laughed again. “Getting impatient, are you?” he teased.

“I’m sorry. That must have been weird to hear. It’s, er... not usually like this.”

“What do you think about pappardelle and bolognese sauce? I got those noodles a while back and I never got a chance to use them.”

_ Now he’s cooking me Italian comfort food? _

Joseph nodded. “Can we make garlic bread with it?”

“Of course.” Caesar ruffled his hair, then scooted aside to stand up and pick up the mug he’d left on the nightstand. “Would you like some more tea? The kettle is already on anyway.”

“I can get it myself,” he replied, starting to get up, but he felt a hand come to rest on top of his head and gently push him back down.

“You don’t have to. I’ll take care of it, JoJo,” Caesar assured him. Then his palm slid down to cup Joseph’s cheek and his match was kissing him.

Joseph closed his eyes and willingly leaned into it. His match tasted like sugar, cream and peppermint, just like the tea they’d been sharing, and he felt warm and melted and so, so lovely, and before he knew it Caesar had pulled back from him. “I’ll be back soon. Just stay here,” he said softly.

He got up and Joseph instinctively reached for him, but his match didn’t see it. His skin ached for more contact, and his whole body seemed to be saying  _ More, I need more, _ but that was a stupid notion and Joseph knew it. He couldn’t just spend the rest of his life fucking someone and doing nothing else. That didn’t mean the idea wasn’t tempting, though.

Joseph lay on his back and stared at the ceiling while he waited for Caesar to come back, deep in thought. He tried to make sense of whatever was swimming around in the swirling vortex of his head. The past night might have been the most intense thing he had ever experienced. He’d never had sex like that before. It wasn’t anything like the hesitant experimental stuff he’d tried with Wendell, and definitely not the cold, clinical kind he’d had with Colette; not even the fun and easy intimacy he’d shared with Suzie could come close to it. This was something on an entirely different level. 

With nowhere else to turn, he started thinking about romance novels. Everything was focused on a love story; that one theme predominated, and meaningless details like plot structure and continuity and sensible world-building fell to the side in favor of getting main characters from point A to point B. Rarely was a romance illustrated in its stable existence. Stories only focused on buildup. Wait, tantalize, hang a carrot in front of a reader’s nose and keep them turning pages, give them that big climactic happy ending, then... then what? It all came to a dead end. And in that moment, after Caesar left the room, Joseph was starting to feel dangerously hollow.

_ Is that what this is? _ Joseph silently wondered.  _ Is it a love story? _ If it was, the writer could have ended it early that morning when he’d fallen asleep in Caesar’s arms. He didn’t want it to end there, but what if that was what the system had wanted all along? Smash random people together, force them to fall in love, then take them apart again and smash them with someone else until they figured out who could fall in love the fastest. The thought of it made him ache, and suddenly he wanted his match to come back more than ever.

Impulsively, he sat up and reached for his instructional pod. He felt for it on the nightstand, eventually finding the round little item lying screen-down next to the alarm clock. He snatched it up and read the display, fearing for a second that it would be flashing red, that an alarm would start going off, or something else would tell him he’d overstayed his welcome. There was only the same message in bold white text that he’d seen on one first date after another.

_ Consult your match to view your deadline. _

Joseph set down the pod and breathed a sigh of relief, falling back into bed. It wasn’t over yet. Not for now, anyway. At least he could take some comfort in that.

When Caesar returned later with more tea, Joseph had actually bothered to get out of bed and put some clothes on. His match walked into the room and set the tea on the nightstand. “Feeling any better?” he asked.

“Significantly,” Joseph replied. He then took Caesar by the waist and pulled him into another long, impassioned kiss. His match laughed and responded in turn, draping his arms over Joseph’s shoulders and straddling him when he was pulled down onto the bed. 

Caesar only humored him for a few minutes; before long, he’d pulled back, a smile on his face. “I was kind of in the middle of something,” he said. “Do you really want to start doing this right now?”

Joseph sighed, pouting his lips a little. “I  _ guess _ not,” he sighed. “I must have just gotten lonely without you.”

“I was in the next room, stupid.”

“I know. Is that too needy of me?”

Caesar considered it for a second, then shook his head. “Not really. Not this time, anyway.”

Joseph was permitted to pull him into another kiss for a few minutes more, then he finally had to give up. His match had left two pots on a hot stove, and he couldn’t just abandon them there. That time, Joseph got up and followed him to the kitchen with the promise that he would help him cook dinner. 

He left his pod behind on purpose. While he and Caesar messed about in the kitchen, he tried as hard as he could not to think about what it refused to tell him.

* * *

 

Once the fine lines between them were broken, life with Caesar became a new adventure in just about every sense of the word. For once, Joseph felt like he was actually making some good progress in his relationship. Everything was a learning experience, as they were always nudging each other in some way or another; Caesar kept him in line, pushed him to keep their place cleaner, woke him up on mornings he seemed unable to drag himself out of bed, and in return Joseph started teaching him how to do theater makeup, shared his small drag wardrobe with him, and gave him the little nudge he needed to loosen up and do something less than expected once in a while. They actually looked through the adverts that poured into their mailbox, since the system was constantly changing and and they’d both made up their minds that they wanted to try as many new things as possible, not to mention the fact that Joseph had a ton of unused credits saved up from his 18 months of banality with Colette. Never was there a dull moment between them. Joseph even learned to make the squid ink sauce for pasta al nero di seppia, and he finally lost his inhibitions about telling Caesar how sexy he looked with ink on his lips.

Even on the days when they just stayed in their unit and watched Joseph’s selection of bad movies or the weird art films that Caesar happened to enjoy, Joseph was no less enthralled. There was just something about Caesar that pulled at him in ways he couldn’t describe. Of course, it might have been that those days were no longer dedicated solely to movies and innocent cuddles. Perhaps the one thing that Joseph most enjoyed learning was how Caesar ticked when he was turned on. He was definitely a romantic at heart; he was always suave and flirtatious right when he knew Joseph would be the most receptive, loving to tease him and catch him off guard. He was a delicate kisser, sweet and gentle, but when prompted in the right way he could turn that around completely. It happened that Caesar’s favorite thing to do was to wear Joseph down to a raw bundle of nerves during sex, then baby him afterwards. Joseph certainly wasn’t complaining; he never knew he would take so well to being spoiled.

He didn’t keep track of the time that passed. Neither of them did. The system didn’t keep them on much of a schedule, so they made up their own as they went along. All they had to do was have fun and be with each other. They bickered frequently, usually about stupid things because it would have been impossible not to, but when all was laid out on the table even that was a good thing. With Caesar, Joseph felt like himself, something he hadn’t felt in a devastatingly long time. Every time they went through another exchange of “ _ fuck off _ ”s, he started considering that maybe he shouldn’t just think of Caesar as his match anymore.

“Should I start calling you my boyfriend?” he asked out of the blue one afternoon.

He and Caesar had been wandering around one of the other parks in the system’s vast cityscape. It wasn’t heavily wooded like their favorite one was- they  _ had _ been caught the night they broke into the pool, as Joseph had figured they would be, and they’d been suspended from visiting privileges for the next three months- but the network of ponds, streams and little waterfalls that spanned the area made up for the absence of trees. It was a sound garden, as Caesar called it; the mix of birdsong, running water and splashing fountains made for a pleasant symphony of background noise. It never failed to get Joseph thinking, and clearly Caesar had caught on to this trend with him.

“I see no reason why you shouldn’t,” he responded while they walked hand in hand down a path they’d never traveled before. “There’s nothing stopping you.”

“I know, but I wouldn’t start saying that if that wasn’t what you wanted to be called.”

“Well, if you  _ did _ start calling me that, who would it be for? Everyone in this city is already dating someone. They’re so wrapped up in each other that they get distanced from everyone else. They won’t care.”

“But... but somehow, I feel like  _ I _ should.”

“Then maybe that says something about you,” Caesar concluded, giving Joseph a coy smile. “You can call me your boyfriend if that's what feels right to you, and I’ll do the same. We can start now.”

“Alright. Starting now.” Joseph skipped ahead, then turned around and stood before him. “I’ll test you. When you look at me, what are you seeing?”

_ “ _ Six feet five inches of pure stupid idiot.”

Joseph's manic smile dropped. “Caesar, you’re not helping me feel any better about this.”

“Hey, I said you were pure. That's something.” Caesar laughed softly, melting Joseph’s heart, and he stepped forward to drape his arms around Joseph's neck. “Just talk to me, tesoro. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

He chose instead to lean his head in toward Caesar’s and let their mouths press together, blindly feeling his boyfriend's soft, beautiful lips with his own. They kissed for a while, Joseph once again failing to keep track of time, and that might have been what reminded him what was wrong. He pulled back and looked into Caesar’s eyes. “Do you remember how it felt when our first match ended?” he asked.

Caesar nodded, a forlorn look on his face. “That was before I spent the next two weeks alone,” he replied. “It all felt so cruel. Like the system had put you in front of me to entice me, and the second I dove in, it took you away.”

“After a while, it hardly even seemed real, did it?”

“It didn't. But you and I know it was.”

“But was it?”

Caesar cocked his head, looking confused. “What are you trying to get at, JoJo?”

“What I'm saying is, what if this is how the system works? What if it's not really a city? It's all just a big simulation where someone on the outside controls everything. Think about it, Caesar. I can't seem to remember a damn thing about my life before I came to this place. Can you?”

“I...” Caesar seemed ready to protest, but a look of grim realization sank into his face. “Dio mio, you're right. I really can't.”

“It sounds too weird to be true, but it all starts to make sense, right?” Joseph went on. “I think that the success rate is bullshit, too. It's not people finding their perfect match. How it really works is they keep us here and put us through relationship after relationship until we get so tired and worn down that we just can't do it anymore, and when they choose someone for us to be with, we no longer have it in ourselves to say no.”

“If that's the case, then why is there still an element of choice? We’ve bent the rules of this place plenty of times, and usually  _ you’re _ the one who’s behind it. If this place really was forcing us onto one track, we wouldn't be able to pull things like that,” Caesar countered. “When the hell did you get so dark?”

“I don't know,” Joseph sighed. “I’ve just.... I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.” He wandered off towards one of the fountains and Caesar followed behind. While he stared at the tireless ripples of water, his boyfriend crept up behind him and wrapped his arms around his waist, laying his head on Joseph's shoulder.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said consolingly. “If you want to talk about it, I’m right here.”

Joseph hesitated for a second, the words sticking on his tongue. He chewed at his lip, then spoke. “Why didn't we check our expiration date?”

“Because we didn't want to know,” Caesar replied. “I still don't want to know. I just want this time with you to be what it is.”

“Right. I remember.” Joseph nodded, still not turning around to face him. “I get stuck on it a lot, but does knowing really matter when it's going to happen anyway?”

“It does, for some people. But we both agreed that it wouldn't for us.” With that, Caesar took the initiative to step around Joseph and face him. “Are you having second thoughts?”

It was an earnest question. Not an attack, not a lure to trap him into anything. But Caesar's piercing green eyes stared right through him, and the cold, heavy sensation of guilt started to pool in his chest.  _ I won't back out on him _ , he promised himself.  _ Not now, not ever. _

“Of course not,” he said. And he meant it.

* * *

The anxiety kept its head down for the next few days. Joseph tried to make a habit of not taking his pod with him everywhere he went, which didn’t exactly sit well with Caesar, since that was his only way of contacting him or knowing his location in the system. After a brief but passionate fight over that, Joseph was forced to drop his efforts to avoid looking at his pod ever again. 

They picked up then right where they had left off. Caesar did his best to keep Joseph’s mind off of the untold information looming over both of their heads. Joseph appreciated it, but that didn’t fend off the creeping fears that plagued him when his boyfriend was asleep, or busy, or if there was any moment at all that they were apart. If he knew when it was going to end, he could have watched himself. Their life together wouldn’t be cut short while he was doing something stupid like going out for a scone by himself or sitting in the metro. He remembered the last night he’d spent with Suzie, staying up and sticking together until their pods screamed at them to part ways. He would be lying if he said he didn’t sometimes still think about her.

He told Caesar, and his boyfriend listened, not minding because he still thought about his own exes at times, Emilio and Gwen and Alistair and a handful of others he barely remembered, wondering if they were okay after he was gone. Suzie, Joseph remembered, was one of the cases where a system participant waited ages in between matches because for some reason the system thought that taunting a person with loneliness would somehow benefit their ability to find a match. It had happened to him once, and it had happened to Caesar just as many times before the system decided he’d be better off getting bombarded with match after match until it he lost count of how many he’d had. Neither of them could figure out why. It circled back to the idea the whole city being a simulation. Did whoever ran the system get some kind of sick joy out of hurting the people in it? There was no way to know. They could only keep on living their lives, make the best of them and hope it didn’t come crashing down before they were ready.

The afternoon they visited the little blue cafe by the river was the first time in ages that Joseph had seen it. He hadn’t so much as looked into the place while with Colette. He’d been afraid to go anywhere near it while he was alone, since the memories of Suzie invariably came back to haunt him. And with Caesar... well, he didn’t know why he hadn’t taken him there sooner. In spite of all the things it made him think of, it was still one of his favorite places. He’d never gotten better tea or pastries anywhere else. So, with an excess of credits still burning holes in his pocket, he decided he wanted to treat Caesar to it.

It was just as pretty as he remembered, still clean and glossy and charmingly simple. He ordered tea, and Caesar ordered an espresso, the two of them getting a scone sample plate to split. Their conversation had wandered, and so had Joseph’s line of sight. The bright red splash of a large mug caught his attention, and when the barista passed directly by their table, he recognized the light dusting of chocolate and cinnamon on top of whipped cream and the torched marshmallow sitting on top of the swirled peak. He’d been speaking, but his words trailed off and disappeared, and his foot accidentally nudged Caesar’s under the table.

“What is it?” his boyfriend asked.

Joseph pulled his gaze away and shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Sorry, I just... I just got stuck on something.” He waited for Caesar to speak, but he never did, and Joseph only had time to think  _ Damn him for being so perceptive _ before he’d glanced back and found the mug for his eyes to follow again. “I know that order. She got the same thing every time we came here.”

A second later, the barista bent and slid the mug onto a small square table in the corner. There weren’t many like it in the restaurant, as nearly every single one had been set up to serve two. The little cushion-topped stool was occupied by a familiar blonde woman, sitting with her head lowered, hooded eyes fixated on a paperback laid out in front of her. A very,  _ very _ familiar blonde woman who looked up at the barista and smiled as she approached, peach-glossed lips spelling out the words  _ thank you _ , and receiving only a polite nod in return before her server turned away and walked back behind the bar. Her bright blue eyes followed the barista longingly, seeming to connect with her long mahogany ponytail and the dropped shoulder of her peasant blouse before falling back into her book.

“Oh my god,” Joseph mumbled, his eyes widening. Caesar turned to look over his shoulder and see what all the fuss was about, but Joseph pulled him back. “No, don’t be obvious about it! She’ll think we’re staring at her.”

That was, however, exactly what they were doing, and Suzie was far too aware of it. For the briefest of seconds she and Joseph locked eyes from across the cafe, and both of them quickly shrank back into their seats and pretended they hadn’t seen each other. Caesar was now shamelessly glancing back and forth between the two of them. “Good god, she looks miserable,” he remarked.

“D-don’t say too much,” Joseph quickly cautioned him. “She already knows we’re talking about her. And for fuck’s sake, don’t do it while you’re gawking at her!”

“Just look at her, though,” his boyfriend protested. “She’s all by herself. Not even the staff are talking to her.”

“Listen, Caesar, if we try to approach her, it’s going to get very uncomfortable, very fast.”

He paused, and Joseph could hear the wheels turning in his boyfriend’s head. “This is about the threesome thing, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s because she hates seeing two men have a nice gay day out,” Joseph sarcastically lamented. “Of  _ course _ it’s about the threesome thing! If she sees us, here, together, and then one of us approaches her, what the hell is she supposed to think?”

“We just won’t bring it up,” Caesar reasoned. “Talking doesn’t automatically imply sex.”

“Not at first.”

“I’m going to invite her to sit with us.” 

Caesar started shifting in his seat to get up, but Joseph’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. “Do not.”

At that, the both of them glanced over at Suzie again to see that she was now intently watching the both of them, probably lost somewhere between intrigue and intense nervousness. Joseph sighed and slowly took his hand back, and Caesar settled down into his chair again, slowly lowering his head to stare at the table.

“Shit,” Joseph muttered. “Now we’ve done it.”

What exactly they’d done remained undetermined. Then, a minute later, the little table in the corner was empty, and Joseph noticed a pair of worn scarlet Keds posed next to their table, perpendicular to his feet and Caesar’s. Suzie was standing right in front of them, plastic poppies in her hair, her book under her arm and her mug of hot chocolate perched between her hands. She summoned up a smile when Joseph met her gaze. “Hi,” she said.

“H-hello,” he lamely responded.

“Um... I, uh, noticed you were here, and... I-I haven’t seen you around here in a long time.”

“You come here often?”

“Almost every day.”

“I haven’t been here in ages. Thought it was high time I finally come back.”

Suzie nodded, her teeth worrying absently at her lip while she took a second to think over his words. She then turned to Caesar. “And, um... I suppose you must be his match.”

“Caesar,” his boyfriend greeted her, giving her a debonair smile. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

The gasp of shock that slipped out of Suzie was subtle, but Joseph noticed it anyway. Her fingers tightened on the mug in her hands, and she looked to her ex. “Th-this is...” she mumbled, then her eyes went back to Caesar. “You’re him. You’re the one he talked about.”

A faint blush rose to his cheeks. “So that’s how I’ve been remembered. JoJo, exactly how much did you talk about me while I was gone?”

Instead of a tasteful flush, Joseph’s face had gone bright red, and one hand was desperately trying to make hiding his face look casual. “Caesar, please, this kind of isn’t the best time for me to be making recollections like this.”

His boyfriend chuckled and laid a hand over his to reassure him. It only served to make Joseph blush harder, knowing that Suzie was standing right next to them and that there was no telling how seeing them together like this inadvertently made her feel. Outside the realm of his hand on his face and his blood rushing in his ears, he heard Caesar keep talking. “So, Suzie, Joseph and I were just talking about you, and he did mention he’s been concerned about how you’ve been doing. And when we saw you... I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I’ve been told I’m a good read of expressions, and yours seemed less than ecstatic.” Classic Caesar, smooth as always.

“It wasn’t, but I won’t bore you with details,” Suzie replied. “I don’t want to interrupt you two or anything. You seem to be doing just fine.”

“That’s up to you. Just know it won’t be any trouble to us if you want to come and sit.” Caesar gave her a wry smile, the same one that could so easily make Joseph melt, and he hoped to god that it wouldn’t give Suzie the wrong idea.

Suzie considered it, toying with the concept of sitting with them, but not for long. All it took was a few seconds before she’d made up her mind, and she set her mug down on their table and ran back to her own to grab her stool and bring it over. Joseph looked wide-eyed at him. “How did you do that?” he asked.

“It’s called making friends and not talking about sex. Maybe if you’d learned to do it, you wouldn’t have ended up here,” he jokingly replied.

Suzie took her place with them just as the same barista who’d given Suzie her hot chocolate brought out their scone plate. As she placed the sampler in front of them, Suzie’s eyes lingered on her the same way that they had before, but the barista didn’t give her so much as a passing glance before leaving the table. Suzie sighed and lowered her gaze to her mug. “I swear, sometimes I’m sure this whole city is run by robots.”

“Joseph’s gone a few steps further than that,” Caesar said. “What was your theory, that this is all just a simulation? Like a rom-com video game?”

“Something along those lines,” Joseph chimed in at long last, finally removing his hand from his face. “That, and the successful matches only stick because we’re too exhausted to leave them.”

“And that’s how you and Caesar have been together this long?” Suzie smirked.

“What? No!” Joseph laughed and glanced over at Caesar again. “We haven’t been together long at all, really. I mean, it’s only been... um... how long has it been?”

Caesar shrugged. “I actually don’t know. I think it’s two months, but who the hell is counting?”

“Not long at all, then,” Suzie remarked, almost sadly. 

“What about you, then?” Joseph asked. “Any luck yet?”

His ex sighed and shook her head. “I’ve been on my own for just about as long as you’ve been together. I’m really starting to get sick of it.”

“Oof,” Caesar remarked with a grimace. “That’s unfortunate. My condolences.”

“It isn’t that big a deal. I’ve gone longer between matches.”

Joseph sighed and Caesar scooted the scone plate over to her. “Are you in the mood to talk about it?” he asked his fellow blonde. “We’ll listen to whatever you have to say if you want us to.” He glanced pointedly over at Joseph, who took the hint easily enough.

“If you need to talk, go on ahead and do it,” he agreed. “The lavender lemon ones are the best, by the way.” He pointed out a frosted scone at the top of the pile.

Suzie eyed the pastry, then snatched it up and bit off one corner. “Alright,” she said. “But it’s a long story, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

* * *

She had been right to warn them, because the saga ended up lasting them all the way through the scone plate, out into the city streets, throughout the little village of shops in the riverside area, and back to their couple’s unit for dinner. The more they talked to her, the more inclined she seemed to stay. Joseph didn’t have the heart to tell her she had to leave.

He’d been planning a little something for Caesar that night, and it had been meant to start with the cafe in the afternoon, but he supposed that would just need to be put on hold. His boyfriend understood, and he seemed just as content to cuddle up next to Joseph while they shared their couch and collection of arthouse and sci-fi films with Suzie over a pizza on the coffee table. When she passed out sometime around 2 AM, they agreed to let her stay where she was, wrapping her up in throw blankets and snuggling a pillow under her head so she wouldn’t wake up cold with a sore neck. Joseph still managed to fit in a quick one with Caesar in the shower before they turned in as well.

That afternoon was the first of what would become many, after Joseph discovered that the instructional pods could be used not only to locate and transmit messages to his match, but any pod-carrying resident of the system. He sent Suzie a speech-to-text message as she left their unit, and she sent him one back when she reached her own. Caesar said something about how he was glad they’d met up with her, and he could see what Joseph had meant when he’d called her manic pixie dream girl material, only she had a real personality and a better sense of humor. Joseph couldn’t place why it warmed his heart to know they got along. It might have been that she was the only other match he’d been given that hadn’t ended in a fight or falling-out. 

Caesar asked if he’d loved her, and Joseph replied that he didn’t know. When it came to him, it was always so hard to tell. He only hoped this wouldn’t change what they had between them, since he had yet to figure out if his cold, stony heart had been melted, at which Caesar laughed and replied with a heartfelt “Fuck off, JoJo.”

From then on, Suzie made a hobby of routinely showing up at their unit and spending time with them. It was sporadic at first, like she was still hesitant to bother them. However, within a week, Joseph would wake up to a speech-to-text from her almost every day. It got to a point where every morning Caesar would jokingly ask if “Tinkerbell” wanted to hang out with them; the nickname stuck when Suzie found out about it and decided that it was basically true, since she was essentially a tiny pixie when compared to the two of them. If anything, she was fun to spend time with and kept them both busy; as much as Caesar liked to complain about how often she stayed overnight, ate their food and didn’t clean up the sheets and blankets she left on the couch, she wasn’t there just because she was told to be. Better yet, as long as she was around, Joseph wasn’t thinking about the ticking time bomb of the deadline that he and Caesar still didn’t know.

It was around then that Joseph found one more flaw that was built into the system: it made it damn near impossible to make friends. He distinctly remembered the month he’d spent alone, how empty and sad he’d felt and how he’d hated to return to his small, lonely unit every day. It had been torture, and like everything else in the system, he figured it served a purpose; the more painful a person’s time between relationships was, the more eager they’d be to dive into a new one. But dear god, did it make life mind-numbingly narrow. He brought it up with Caesar and Suzie, and all of them agreed that it was mildly disturbing how much subliminal conditioning was involved in making the system work. 

Then, one morning when Suzie was conveniently in their kitchen baking popovers with Caesar, Joseph fetched the mail and saw an announcement in a postcard from their new favorite drag club, the one where they had invaded the dressing room and Caesar had lost his drag virginity. They were having a throwback-themed swing party, and the second the word “throwback” was out of his mouth, Suzie’s eyes lit up. Caesar, of course, asked if she’d ever done drag before. She used to in college but hadn’t performed in years, and she missed it dearly. She all but begged them to let her come with them, and she hadn’t really needed to, because Joseph was already thinking of how cute she’d look in a pinstriped suit with a pencil mustache.

Another trip to Rainbows landed them with a mothball-scented vintage suit, plus a chest binder, wide-brimmed fedora and suspenders. At Rizzo’s recommendation, Caesar had gotten his hands on a blonde bob wig for Portia Versace; the queens at the club and Joseph all agreed that it was a good look for him. Now they were back in the same place an uncounted handful of weeks later, and Lexington was kind enough to give Joseph a hand with painting Suzie up to look like a proper gentleman.

At the end of the makeover, Suzie’s face was clean and sharp, looking like a classic Buster Keaton. She’d spent days working on her name, and she announced herself as Benny “the Unicorn” Fitz. It had been debated for a while, but it was the joke “You’ve got a friend with Benny Fitz” that did everyone in. Joseph cemented the christening by encircling her with halo of hairspray, finding the new tradition a nice touch even if this wasn’t really Suzie’s first stab at drag.

The night passed by in a boozy, exciting blur. There weren’t many shots poured, but there didn’t need to be. Once the performances came on, the spirit of the night took off all on its own. Rizzo sang with a live band ensemble, and in the same span of minutes JoJo gave Benny a crash course in swing dancing. As a nice surprise, he had a pretty strong tolerance for being spun and tossed around with reckless abandon. Portia was brought onstage to assist Karmilla in an elaborate striptease routine. Portia even joined in, shedding her feather boa and gloves and throwing them into the crowd, driving them all wild. That was how, at the end of the night, Benny was teasing his friends with the ends of the feathers, and JoJo Tequila had wound up with Portia’s pearls and gloves, Portia stealing Benny’s hat and JoJo’s bracelets in return.

By the time the party had ended and everyone was starting to sober up, no one had it in mind to check what time it was. The show had been earlier that night, probably chalked up to booking conflicts or something else that none of them had much control over.  Finally, someone checked a clock. It was a quarter past midnight, and the night didn’t feel even remotely over. What they were supposed to do next, though, remained undecided. Were they to try to find another club, whatever was open would definitely be at capacity by that hour. The next hour saw them all on the metro together, even though Joseph could have sworn that Suzie lived halfway across the city. He asked, and she confirmed that she did, but after the night they’d had, she didn’t feel much like going home and sleeping by herself.

Once back at the couple’s unit, no one seemed sure what the next step would be. Joseph poured out some haphazard mixed drinks, still in full JoJo Tequila costume, while Caesar abandoned his heels, wig and fake eyelashes, and Suzie dropped her jacket, though she stayed in the buttondown and suspenders. “It makes me feel classy,” she justified.

“Yeah, and you were classy as hell when JoJo lost you while spinning and you face-planted right into my tits,” Caesar reminded her with a smirk.

“Hey, that was an accident!” she tossed back, though the smeared half of her mustache and matching smudge of makeup on Caesar’s cleavage was living proof of what had happened.

Joseph laughed at the both of them. “My only regret is that nobody caught that on camera.”

“I will say, your tits were a lovely landing pad. I’d take them over the floor any day.”

That got Caesar blushing. “Is Benny still trying to seduce me? Because I’ll say it as many times as I need to: I’m a taken lady.”

“I wouldn’t mind sharing you, if we  _ really _ got down to it,” Joseph chimed in, absently stirring his drink with his straw. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done it.”

“It would be for me,” his boyfriend said, hiding a coy smile behind his drink. “So I’m a little less sure. If you could convince me, though, I’d be thoroughly impressed.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment, and Suzie had her eyes fixed on Caesar, a look of intense focus on her face as if she were contemplating something. Her gaze flitted to Joseph for a brief second, then she tilted her head back and downed the rest of her drink. She set the glass down on the countertop and sighed. “I didn’t pack for tonight. Do either of you mind letting me borrow a shirt or something?”

Joseph shook his head, and Caesar responded with a friendly, “Knock yourself out.”

“Good. I’m gonna go take a look.” Just like that she’d left the counter and disappeared into the bedroom. The ensuing silence hung over Joseph’s head like a storm cloud. He stared at his ex’s empty glass on the counter, trying to find an answer there as to what the hell he was supposed to do next. When he finally looked to Caesar, he found that his boyfriend was doing the exact same thing.

“That wasn’t too forward of me, was it?” he said, his fingers anxiously raking his golden hair back from his forehead. “She had to know I was joking. I mean, I hope she knew I was.”

“I can’t be sure,” Joseph replied. “If she’s pissed, I was the one who started it.”

“And I finished it. What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

“Not a bloody clue. We’ll just have to wait until she comes back and hope she isn’t seething with rage.”

“Have you ever seen her angry before?”

“Yes, a few times.”

“I’m having a really hard time picturing it.”

“Well, if we’re lucky, it can stay in your imagination.”

Caesar sank back into his chair and finished his drink as well, slamming down the empty glass in the same manner that Suzie had. Before either of them said anything more, Suzie emerged from the bedroom, her mustache cleaned off her upper lip, her hands carrying something which was definitely not a shirt. A sly, playful look came over her face as she held up her find for them both to see; a pair of soft handcuffs made out of silky rope. “JoJo, Caesarino,” she said in a singsong voice. “Would either of you boys care to explain these?”

Joseph choked on his drink before shakily setting the glass down, and he saw that Caesar’s face had flushed cherry-red. “U-um...” his boyfriend stuttered. “That’s, uh...”

“Suzie, how the hell did you even find those?” Joseph gasped once he’d caught his breath. “I thought you went in there looking for a shirt!”

“I don’t always remember where you put things,” she simply replied, now playfully swinging the handcuffs on one finger. “Have they ever been used before?”

“Suze, look... it’s really late. Can we get into this later?” 

His ex let her hand drop, her teasing grin crumpling into a pout. “Do you really not have the energy for it?” she asked. “As long as you don't forget to talk about it tomorrow.”

Joseph felt his face go blank, and all he could think was  _ Is she serious? _ One glance at Caesar told him that his boyfriend was on the same page. They both stared at Suzie, stunned, until finally Caesar spoke up. “Do you actually mean that?”

Without hesitation, Suzie nodded. “If that's what you’d be into. You did say you've never taken more than one at a time before.”

“But... you don't think it's weird?” Joseph asked. “With everything you told me, I thought you were sick of stuff like that.”

His ex shook her head with a smirk. “I liked doing it,” she explained. “I just couldn't stand that people thought of it as all I was good for. Just promise you won't cut me off and forget about me after it’s over.”

Joseph's teeth worried at his lip, and he looked over at Caesar. He remembered how much fun she was back then. Far as he could tell, she hadn't changed, and he knew damn well that she hated to be alone just as much as he did.

Caesar glanced sideways at Joseph, took a breath and turned to regard Suzie again. “I won't say I'm not interested,” he said. “Joseph always recalls you fondly. And you're just as gorgeous as he said you were, if not more.”

“Oh, Caesar!” Suzie blushed and put a hand to her cheek. “You really mean that?”

“Of course. I wouldn't have said it if I didn't.” He smiled, and Joseph rolled his eyes and chidingly nudged Caesar’s arm. Of course he’d gone full Casanova at the first invitation. His boyfriend looked back at him, now his forces combined with Suzie, waiting for his answer.

“I haven't done something like this in a while, so forgive me if I need a little help remembering how it works,” he said. “But I'm not exhausted. Feel free to rail me as much as you like.”

The coquettish look returned to Suzie’s face, and she once again raised up the rope handcuffs. “Well, to start... We need to find someone who’s willing to put these on.”

Caesar shifted in his chair and recrossed his legs before fixing Suzie with a flirty, almost submissive look. “I don't know if Joseph told you, but he’d been meaning to try those on me.”

“We were going to try it the night after you met us at the cafe,” Joseph explained. “But then you showed up, and we didn’t want to make it weird.”

“Now’s the time to make it as weird as you like, then.” Suzie stepped forward and gave Caesar a thorough once-over. “You should probably take the dress and all the drag gear off sooner rather than later. It’s going to be kind of difficult with the cuffs on.”

Joseph watched his boyfriend stand up and move toward the open space of the living room. “I might need a little assistance with it. Do you mind?” He looked over at Joseph. “You’re invited, too.”

Joseph was busy chewing his lip, but no longer with indecision. He knew what was coming, and he felt arousal coming to a slow boil in his core already. He stepped out from behind the counter, his towering heels clicking against the floor. “Only if you take care of me first.”

Caesar and Suzie eagerly agreed. They took Joseph's hands, one to each of them, and led him to the living room. It started with Caesar at his back, carefully unzipping his bodysuit, then Suzie by his legs, her small, nimble fingers tugging at his thigh-high fishnets, then wandering higher and brushing his crotch, feeling him up while Caesar started to kiss his neck, gently at first, then growing more heated, tugging at his ear with his teeth and trailing his tongue across his skin. The padding on his chest fell to the floor alongside his push-up bra, his skirt pooled around his feet, and his hardening cock was straining against the tight prison of the tucking tape that rode up his back. He reached down and tried to release it only to have Caesar catch his wrists and pull his hands away, holding them firmly back by his shoulders. “Naughty boy,” he whispered into Joseph’s ear. “So impatient. Just wait and see what she’s got in store for you.”

A strained whimper escaped Joseph's throat as he nodded. At his front, he felt Suzie peeling the tape away, then running her short nails over the corded expanse of his abs. “Oh, my. I've missed these,” she teased him. His nipples were hard and his chest was flushed, he could feel it, and when she flicked one with her fingers, it drew a startled yelp from him.

A second later, Caesar was pushing against his shoulders and bringing him down to his knees, and Suzie stood up, motioning for Caesar to lend her one of Joseph's hands. She then guided it to the fly of her pinstriped slacks. “Go on. Undo it.”

“Of course,” Joseph agreed. He undid the button and took down the zipper. Suzie helped a little, shrugging off her suspenders and letting the pants slide down off her legs and onto the floor. She kicked them away, then brought Joseph's hand to her crotch, pressing his fingers up against the soft, warm pillows of skin between her thighs.

“You remember this?” she asked.

He did, and quite vividly. He also recalled what she used to have him do to it. She smiled down at him, pleased, then took a small, flat package out of her pocket, one with which Joseph had become very familiar in his lifetime. She had Caesar hold the dental dam package in his teeth while she tore it open, then she reached behind her and unlatched her chest binder, letting her round, pale breasts free before she laid the dam out over the slit of her vulva. She raised one leg over Joseph’s shoulder and stood gracefully on her other foot, gripping his hair for balance. He brought his face up between her legs, gently placing his mouth against her pussy. His tongue flicked out and probed carefully at her, then her grip on his hair tightened, and he knew he found the right spot. Her back arched as he circled his tongue around her clit. “Ah, yeah... Good boy...” she sighed. “You remembered everything.”

For a moment he thought that was it, but before he knew it he felt hands traveling up his sides, down his back and over his hips; as goosebumps rose on his skin in response, he remembered that Caesar was behind him, pressed up against his back, and once again his boyfriend’s mouth was at his neck. The warmth and calluses of his hands traveled down the V of Joseph’s hips and traced gently over the inside of his thighs, making his cock twitch in anticipation and his open mouth emit a small, needy whine. Suddenly he was being stroked while Caesar’s other hand grasped at his chest and toyed with his nipples, his teeth needling playfully at his neck, and Joseph could practically feel the red marks blooming on his skin. He tried desperately to focus on the task at hand, the smell and taste of Suzie still heavy on his senses as she ground his mouth against her warm, wet slit. His hips bucked into Caesar’s hand and he found himself grasping at her hips, moaning desperately as he latched onto her clit and sucked. She held him there, gasping as her cries pitched higher and higher. “Ah, yes... yes, yes! D-don’t stop!”

“Oh,  _ fuck _ ~” Joseph gasped, and his whole body shuddered as he came hard and fast into Caesar’s hand. He tried to hold on to Suzie, but he felt himself slipping, and a second later he had fallen back, ribs heaving, against Caesar. 

Suzie knelt down in front of him, leaning over his body to caress his chest with her nails. “Good job, JoJo,” she praised him. “How’re you feeling? Can you stand up?”

“In a minute,” Joseph replied. “I meant it when I said I haven’t done this in a while.”

“Okay. Just let us know when you’re ready.” His ex leaned in and pressed a kiss to his lips as a reward, staying for a few seconds and giving him a little taste of tongue before she pulled back. He smiled at her, and she returned it for a moment before turning to Caesar. “Come here, Caesarino,” she cooed to him, reaching a hand out to cradle his chin before pulling him close and pressing his mouth against her own.

Joseph turned his head to watch, the same hot interest he’d felt before creeping up in his body again. The kiss Caesar got was longer, hotter, their lips open against each other as their tongues intertwined, tasted and explored. His boyfriend got just a brief moment to pull back and gasp “Dio mio, you’re a really good kisser.” before she pulled him back in again. 

It wasn’t long at all before Joseph’s body was aching for contact once again. He leaned in towards the two of them and pecked Suzie’s cheek. “Hey. Let me in on some of that.”

Caesar looked over at him, smirked, then didn’t hesitate to bring him in and start kissing him as well. Joseph’s tongue delved into the warm, smooth flavor of him, the same one that had him addicted from the first time he’d tasted it. He held out as long as he could until he was interrupted by a little startled gasp from Caesar. A glance downward told him all he needed to know; Suzie’s hand was resting between his boyfriend’s legs, fingers pressing at his still-tucked crotch. “Someone here still needs to get out of his costume,” she giggled.

“Oh, how dare we forget?” Joseph teased. “Let’s get that taken care of, why don’t we?”

They got Caesar to his feet and, once he was standing, gave him the very same treatment that Joseph had gotten: slow and careful undressing, touches all over, lips and hands and fingertips everywhere he could imagine. Joseph’s heels were still on, giving him the extra height to quite literally shower Caesar with kisses, creating a trail of them leading from his lips to his jaw, down his neck and dripping slowly down the centerline of his body. He took his sweet time exploring the curves and ripples of his lover’s cut, muscular body, occasionally meeting Suzie’s eyes as she did the same, reading one sumptuous approval after another. Once everything was off of him, Suzie stood up and wrapped an arm around his waist, lowering one hand to give his ass a firm squeeze. Caesar gasped, then his gaze fell to Joseph, like he was wondering what other surprises he and Suzie had in mind.

Joseph’s response was to take out the flavored condom that Suzie had handed him and place it over the reddened head of Caesar’s firm cock. He proceeded to take the tip into his mouth, carefully fasten his lips around it and smoothly work his way down the shaft, rolling the condom along with the tight ring of his mouth. Caesar’s body shuddered and he tilted his head back, letting out a low groan. “Ohhh,  _ cazzo _ , è così buono,” he murmured. “I never knew you had  _ that _ trick up your sleeve.”

“I’ve been saving it for a special occasion,” Joseph replied, grinning up at his boyfriend before going in and taking his whole cock into his mouth. Caesar gasped and grabbed his hair in response, but it only lasted so long before Suzie caught him and pulled his hands away from Joseph’s head. 

At the sudden disappearance, Joseph pulled back and let Caesar’s cock slide out of his mouth with an obscene  _ pop _ . Suzie had the handcuffs again, and all of them could see it. “I think it’s about time to bring these out,” she said, grinning. “Do you feel ready?”

“I don’t see why not,” Caesar replied with a shrug, offering up his hands to Suzie. 

She politely declined his offer. “Not just yet,” she said. “Let’s get somewhere a little more comfortable first.”

A second later they were all gathered in the bedroom, regarding each other carefully. Suzie had a devious smile on her face; it was a look Joseph had seen before, and it nearly always meant she was plotting. “There’s something I think you both should know before we keep going,” she said. 

“Which is?” Caesar asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I’ve never had two guys at once before,” she said. “This stuff pretty much always the other way around. And that being the case, there’s something I have always wanted to try, but I've never gotten the chance.”

Joseph squirmed a bit in anticipation. Now he was intrigued. “What do you want us to do? Are we bringing out the handcuffs yet?”

“In a minute!” she promised. “First, I want you two to get reacquainted. Do what you’d do if I wasn’t here. I’ll let you know when the next part comes in.”

It seemed like a weird request to make in the middle of a threesome, but Joseph quickly figured out why she’d made it. While he and Caesar got tangled up in each other again, he spied Suzie out of the corner of his eye, sitting back on her heels, legs spread wide and her fingers toying with the wet pink folds of her pussy. His hand slid down to palm Caesar's slicked-up cock while she dug her fingers into herself, her heavy, gasping breaths in tune with the soft, lilting moans of his boyfriend under him. He brought his head down to rest his cheek against Caesar’s thigh, trailing a few nips and kisses along the soft, sensitive skin there before pulling the length of his shaft into his mouth again. His hands gripped Caesar’s hips as his back arched, his body bucking up off the mattress. Only then did Suzie’s breathless voice and slick fingers interrupt them. 

She picked up the handcuffs and handed them over to Joseph. “Here. Now we can bind someone. My vote is still on Caesar.”

Joseph gladly accepted the cuffs from her. “Before we do, mind grabbing my scarf from the closet? There’s one more thing I had in mind.”

Suzie did, taking a minute to find it. When she returned, Joseph leaned in toward Caesar and whispered in his ear. “Are we going to need a safe word?”

Caesar nodded, and he relayed the message to Suzie. She suggested  _ Pygar _ , the name of the alluring blonde angel from  _ Barbarella _ , and both Joseph and Caesar jokingly reminded her that this needed to be a word that they  _ wouldn’t _ want to scream in the middle of sex. It stuck, though, so Joseph went ahead and slipped the rope cuffs onto Caesar’s wrists, then took the scarf from Suzie and carefully tied it over his boyfriend’s eyes. He whispered to him once again. “Comfortable?”

“Surprisingly,” he replied, pulling a little at the cuffs. They held fast without cutting into his wrists, and he surrendered with a smile, giving himself up to whatever was coming next.

Suzie stepped in with the instructions. “Okay. Joseph, you have the other condom I gave you. Put it on, then put Caesar in your lap and start to fuck him sitting up.”

Joseph carefully helped bring his boyfriend up to his knees. He needed to bend him over first, carefully probing him with fingers and coaxing him with kisses and whispers. Caesar was always tense at first, requiring a bit of preparation before the tightness of his body gave way to eager softening as Joseph opened him up little by little. Once he had Caesar spread out against the bed, waiting and wanting, he grasped his boyfriend by the hips and slid into him. The man under him tossed his head back and keened softly, his body clenching tight around Joseph’s cock as he ground his ass backwards against him. Joseph then pulled him upright, tugging his body back until Caesar was sitting up, legs apart, straddling him backwards as gravity pushed his lover deeper into him. Joseph began to roll his hips against his boyfriend, pumping slowly in and out of him; Caesar laid his head back on Joseph's shoulder and breathlessly moaned at the ceiling. Suzie’s eyes caught his, and she crawled forward to take her place with them.

She approached Caesar, sidling up against his body and draping his bound arms around her neck. Joseph felt him quivering as she first kissed at his throat, feeling for his pulse with her lips and leaving small red-violet marks to match the ones Joseph had given him before reaching down to stroke him, feeling his weight and size in the palm of her hand. Then, with a huff of effort, she pulled herself up into his lap and ground up against him, guiding his turgid cock right into herself with one fluid movement.

Caesar cried out as Suzie enveloped him, his body jumping in between the both of them, thrusting automatically up against Joseph’s ex. Her shockingly powerful legs held fast to his hips, keeping herself in place, and her hands fastened onto his shoulders while she writhed against him to get some friction in between them. Her hazy eyes met with Joseph’s, and they kissed over Caesar’s shoulder as they both moved together, fucking him from both sides. He thrashed blindly between them, reduced to a gasping, whimpering mess, all sweat and blush and half-finished strings of curses thrown from his mouth in the throes of a mounting climax. Joseph’s hands clung to Suzie’s waist, holding her tight as he kept grinding his body against Caesar; before long the heat and passion grew mind-numbingly intense, and he felt tension rapidly building between his hips, threatening to explode. 

Caesar, however, was the first one of them to lose it. With a loud, piercing scream, his body jolted and shuddered, making Suzie gasp as she felt the sudden rush of his orgasm hitting her secondhand. He remained there, sandwiched tight between them as Joseph lost his resolve next, the thrust of his hips growing fast and erratic until finally his hands clenched tight against Suzie’s skin, clutching both her and Caesar close to him as he fell into an orgasm for the second time that night, this time causing Caesar to moan and press up against Suzie. She climaxed not long afterwards, draining Caesar’s cock of all it was worth. By then, he was about ready to collapse; Joseph and Suzie finally pulled out and off and let him do just that.

The night passed in a haze of casual touches, warm and intimate exchange, a caress of legs or trace of nails over skin, mouth against breast or tongue against throat. Caesar took his own turn with his head between Suzie's legs, and when the next few hours were up and the night was wearing thin with the oncoming dawn, none of them had it in them to move anymore. Suzie was the first to point out that they were all drenched in sweat, then got up to borrow their shower for the thousandth time. Joseph watched her go, then retrieved Caesar and pulled his boyfriend up against him, laying his head against his chest to run his fingers through his hair, which was infinitely more tousled than usual. Caesar’s eyes were wide and hazy, like he was still trying to come to terms with what just happened.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything that good in my whole life,” he said breathlessly. “But now I can’t move.”

Joseph laughed and kissed his boyfriend on the forehead. “Welcome to Suzie After Dark. You know I wasn’t lying now, don’t you?”

“I never dreamed you were.”

Suzie came back eventually, after which Joseph and Caesar headed to get cleaned off next. Leaving the bathroom, they caught Suzie taking a blanket and pillow to the couch, as was her usual habit. Caesar was the one who stopped her and offered to let her sleep in their room instead. She smiled, seeming weirdly touched by such a simple gesture, and gladly accepted. She borrowed a shirt from Joseph, which fit her more like a dress, and they snuggled her comfortably in between them in their bed. Compared to the two of them, she hardly took up any space at all, and she fit between them just fine. 

Joseph settled in with Suzie’s head nestled against his shoulder, holding Caesar’s hand across her waist. In that small bubble of space, everything was warm and drowsy and delirious, and Joseph almost wished he could capture that feeling like a photograph and go back to it whenever he wanted. The thought only stayed with him for a little while, though, because in no time at all, he was fast asleep.

When the next morning in finally made itself known, it was nearly not morning at all anymore, and Suzie hadn't moved. Joseph was the first to wake up, stirring carefully before sitting up and looking over at the two blondes who shared his bed.

Suzie was huddled close to Caesar, his arm draped protectively around her, his cheek against the top of her head. A little flurry of warmth filled Joseph’s heart.  _ Has she ever looked this comfortable before? _ he wondered to himself. He didn't ask her to confirm it; that would involve waking them up, and he didn't dare do something like that, not when they both looked so cozy and peaceful. Instead, he leaned in and gave them both a kiss on the forehead before getting up and shuffling to the kitchen to cook them something for... was it even early enough to call it brunch anymore? 

He didn't know, and he didn't particularly care. It didn’t matter so long as they could both have something nice to wake up to. Not only that, but it was the best way he knew how to assure Suzie that they both still cared. She wouldn't be forgotten this time. He would make damn sure of it.

* * *

The day after everything had gone over, it was Caesar’s idea to make plans with Suzie again. She was elated to see him when he answered the door and welcomed her in, pouncing to greet him with a tight hug and a kiss on his cheek; Joseph was almost certain she’d expected the day after the threesome to be the last she heard from them, though she’d surely never admit it out loud. They spent the afternoon over tea, coffee and hot chocolate respectively, plus the freshly baked cookies Suzie had made and brought over to share with them, talking about all the dumb things they did while they were alone, mistakes they’d made in the past and what they hoped would be better once the system got their love lives sorted out.

Joseph had been afraid he’d have to work to convince his boyfriend that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stay friends with his ex. Caesar liked her, though, and quite a lot. They had never matched, but Joseph was sure that if they had, they could have hit it off just fine, not at all unlike she had with him. She was lively, Caesar told him after she went home, funny and exciting and energetic, not to mention cute in a way that made a person want to keep coming back. Suzie was the type who naturally made people want to care for her, and Joseph and Caesar were more than happy to fill that role. She’d been alone for quite some time, they both knew, and whoever she ended up with would be lucky to have her.

As much as Joseph wanted her to find someone, he was nervous. As long as she didn’t have a system-mandated match to spend every waking moment with, she’d be free and willing to keep whiling her days away with the two of them. The system tended to change a person’s life entirely as soon as a match was settled. What would happen then? 

Inevitably, these conversations with himself always ended the same way. He shook it all off, reminded himself  _ That’s stupid, that’s a horrible way to think, when she finally finds a match you should be happy for her _ and finally moved on. Never once did he think about the fact that maybe the reason he was so attached to her was that she gave him something to focus on that wasn’t the invisible countdown on his pod’s screen. He knew it was there, always marching onward, though he’d never be able to see it. It would run out someday, whether he was ready for that to happen or not.

Suzie had hooked up with them twice more, and Joseph was hardly sure how much time had passed when, one morning, she’d come over earlier than usual and brought scones from their communally favorite cafe to split for breakfast before venturing out to the latest attraction that had been added to the city. They hadn’t decided yet, since Joseph and Caesar had been getting way too many advertisements in their mail to keep track of everything properly.

“I’m thinking the ice park might be fun,” Suzie suggested as she flipped through the pamphlets. “That’s going to be a limited time offer, since the seasons are changing soon.”

“Almost everything is a limited time offer here,” Caesar pointed out. “The attractions get a total overhaul, what, every six months?”

“Something like that,” Joseph agreed.

“This is more limited than usual, though,” Suzie countered. “It’s only here for six weeks. Going by the dates, two of those are already up.”

“But the whole winter wonderland thing... aren’t you worried that’s going to be, I don’t know, kind of campy?”

Caesar scoffed. “Of all people, JoJo Tequila is worried about something being too campy.”

“Listen, principessa, camp has its place. But it’s got to be done right.”

“We could at least check it out,” Suzie pressed, punctuating with a sip of hot chocolate.

“She’s right. We could just go before paying for any walkthroughs or rides or anything if the place looks like it sucks,” Caesar agreed.

At last, Joseph relented. “You’ve got a point. I guess being in the system so long starts to fuck with you.”

“As in not realizing you aren’t married to things as soon as they’re offered to you?” Suzie asked.

“Yeah. I mean... in a real-world context, it just doesn’t seem realistic, does it?”

He watched both blondes in the room nod in unison. “It’s ridiculous,” Caesar agreed. “Anyway... the ice park will take up a few hours. Then we’ll probably all be freezing our tits off and want to go somewhere indoors. We don’t have plans for later tonight. Do you want to hang around with us until then?”

Suzie chewed her lip, acting like she was considering, though Joseph knew she said yes every damn time. “I’d really like to. You honestly wouldn’t mind if I did?”

“Suze, you know there’s a reason why we ask you every time.”

She giggled. “You’re not the only one who’s sometimes slow on the uptake, JoJo.”

“You got me there.”

Caesar drained his coffee and set the mug in the sink. “Well, if we’re going soon, I probably should put on some actual clothes.” He looked over at Joseph, who was standing in the middle of the kitchen wearing only a pair of sweatpants. “Feel free to get around to that whenever you like, tesoro,” he teased.

The jab left Joseph blushing. “Hey. Can I at least finish my tea first?”

“Yes, since you asked so nicely. But I don’t want us to be standing around waiting for you, okay?”

“Okay, principessa.” He blew a kiss to Caesar over the rim of his mug, and his boyfriend stuck his tongue out in return before disappearing into the bedroom.

Suzie watched him go, then took it upon herself to finish the last scone. “You’re sure that neither of you mind me being around here so much?”

“Of course not,” Joseph assured her. “We all think it’s kind of bullshit that the system doesn’t encourage people to be friends. Not just that but that it cuts people off totally when they hit their deadline.”

“If you and I had dated in real life... I mean, not just because we were told to, but actually just happened upon each other and got together like we did here... Do you think we still would have kept hanging out?”

“I really don’t know why we wouldn’t have. We were good together. Maybe not exceptional, but I think we did alright.”

“It didn’t end in a mess.”

“Exactly. And I think that’s worth something. It’s not often things end so easy like that.”

Suzie nodded, then took a final sip of her hot chocolate. “Well, I’m glad you at least came back to the cafe. When you find a place here that you really like, you-” Before she could finish, a shrill, piercing chime issued from her pocket. 

First Joseph’s eyes widened, and he stared at her, his mouth slightly open in shock. It seemed to take Suzie a moment to realize that the sound was coming from her pod. Almost vibrating with excitement, she plunged her hand into her pocket and brought it out; it buzzed in her palm, and the screen flashed its straightforward white text at her, reading the message that she’d spent months waiting to see. 

_ Your new match is waiting to meet you! _

Suzie gasped, a huge, elated smile on her face. She tapped on the screen to read the time and address of her upcoming date, and Caesar burst through the bedroom door, leaning out into the living room. “Was that Suzie’s pod?” he asked.

Joseph eagerly nodded. “It sure as fuck was.”

Suzie, meanwhile, was too surprised to speak. She stared unwaveringly at the screen, still smiling, seemingly unable to stop. She turned to Caesar like she wanted to say something, but she only squealed in excitement and held her arms out to him. He rushed in and scooped her up, spinning her around and cheering along with her. “You got your match! You finally got it! I’m so proud of you!”

When Caesar finally set her down, they gathered together again so she could go over the details of her upcoming date. She was scheduled to be in the entertainment district by three that afternoon, and whoever she was matched with would be there waiting for her. That meant that she probably couldn’t tag along with them to the ice park that day. It would suck, for the moment, but she’d be back soon enough, she was sure. The system couldn’t keep them apart for long. This time she’d have someone on her arm as well. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore, at least not in the way that the system valued most. Joseph figured he should be happy about that. After all, this match was long overdue. Suzie deserved it.

She left their unit, giving them both a kiss as a parting gift. She promised she’d return to them as soon as she could, and when she did, she’d introduce them to her new boyfriend or girlfriend or date mate or whoever she ended up with. Joseph told her he couldn’t wait.

* * *

Suzie never came back.

Joseph didn’t have much of a way to count the days. However many had passed, it was too long. 

He thought about leaving her some speech-text messages on her pod, then thought better of it. What if she’d ended up with someone possessive? What if they thought she was cheating? Worse yet, what if they went after Caesar to get back at him? He couldn’t stand the thought. The system was supposed to have ways to circumvent all these things anyway. If he was blocked from contacting her because people couldn’t speak to matched parties unless one of them reached out first or some such other shitty tactics were in place, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

As was natural to him by now, Joseph went to Caesar to drown it all out. He could always trust his boyfriend to make things better. They were at a point where he hardly even needed to ask for comfort anymore; Caesar could read him like a book and knew how he operated, which movies to put on, what food to cook and what tea to brew, when he’d be in a mood to go out and when they needed to stay in and take a night off from thinking. He tried to be just as perfect towards him, because Caesar deserved that in return for everything he did.

They both knew the real reason why Joseph was so needy. Suzie was just at the periphery. But Caesar still didn’t want to view the deadline, so Joseph had no choice but to comply.

They went on trying to live their lives as they had before. It was nice, for what it was, and Joseph found more than enough to be grateful for. He tried to savor every moment he had with Caesar: cooking with him, teasing him, drawing that beautiful laugh from his perfect lips, dressing up, getting drunk, falling asleep and waking up next to him with a heartwarming exchange of “ _ fuck off _ ”s. The only problem was that the longer he went without a distraction, the heavier the weight on his mind became. Every day was interrupted by a rude awakening:  _ all of this is going to disappear someday, and you are never going to see it coming. _

Joseph didn’t know how long Suzie had been gone, but it was far too long. It was snowing, and he and Caesar had spent the day at home together. They’d made pizza from scratch, spent the whole time laughing and staining each other with flour, shared a bath afterwards with a little slow, languid sex thrown in, and at the end, Caesar had fallen asleep on his chest while one episode of _The Twilight Zone_ played after another. Joseph shut the TV off and helped his boyfriend into bed. He’d tried to get some rest, but no matter how he laid still and kept his eyes closed, sleep seemed determined to evade him. He sat up in bed and looked towards the window, where the curtains were slightly parted. It was still snowing. With nothing better to do, Joseph rolled out of bed and wandered into the living room to watch the snow drift down onto the city below.

The pale snowflakes glowed stark white against the indigo sky, fluttering down in haphazard paths until they disappeared into the lights of the sleepless city. Joseph stared at them, and the silence of the unit was deafening. Something about the image outside his window felt a touch too perfect, as if he were looking at how someone who had never seen snow before might imagine it looked rather than what snow was actually like. 

He glanced back at the bedroom door, which he’d left open behind him. He half expected to see Caesar standing there, somehow having sensed his absence in his sleep and wanting to know where he’d gone. The doorway was empty, though, and he vividly imagined the sound of Caesar’s slow, heavy sleep-breathing as he kept dreaming without him. His heart sank, and he scolded himself for hoping for that much.  _ You’re expecting far too much from him, Joseph. He can’t be with you every second of the day. It just isn’t realistic. _

Turning back to stare towards the window, Joseph suddenly felt profoundly alone. Sometime in the future, he knew he would be. That used to be a mere reality that he could accept, but something had changed in him when he’d been matched with Caesar. What it was, he couldn’t say, but there was one thing he knew for sure. He couldn’t take this torturous waiting any longer.

His pod was lying on the coffee table, where he had left it during the  _ Twilight Zone _ marathon. He reached over and picked it up, leaned his head against the window and brushed his thumb across the screen to wake it up. The device chimed softly in response, displaying the same message that he’d become incorrigibly sick of seeing. 

_ Consult your match to view your deadline. _

With a shaking hand, he brought the pod up to his lips. “Show me my deadline,” he commanded it.

The pod chirped in response, notifying him that he’d been heard, and then the automated response came. “I’m sorry, but system mandate declares that you cannot view your deadline without the consent of your match.”

Joseph pulled back and stared at the screen, frowning. “But... but isn’t there some other way to see it?”

“System mandate declares that you cannot view your deadline without the consent of your match.”

“Come on,” Joseph begged the impassive machine. “Please. I need to see it. Just once. I’m about to lose my damned mind.”

“System mandate declares that-”

“I know what the bloody system mandate declares! I just... I need to know. Isn’t there an override or something you can do?”

The pod was silent for a moment, as if taking time to think. Finally, the device chimed again. “Requesting a mandate override may result in penalties being inflicted upon your current status. These may include loss of system credits or a reduction of deadline time.”

“I don’t fucking care, just show me the deadline! Tell me how much time I have left with him!”

The pod sounded off one last time, and a buffer ring appeared on the screen. “Override accepted. Retrieving deadline data.” 

Seconds passed, becoming nearly a whole minute, just long enough for Joseph to start to regret what he’d done. Suddenly he didn’t want to see the deadline anymore. He just wanted to go back to bed, hold Caesar, be with him for as long as he could be before it all ended. But when he tried to lock the pod, the screen wouldn’t turn off. No matter how many times he pressed the little button on the side, the buffer ring just kept on spinning.

Finally, the data was retrieved, and the deadline appeared.  _ 33 days. _

Joseph felt his shoulders drop as the tension in them disappeared. 33 days, only a little more than a month. He didn’t know if he should be glad that he’d caught this now, or crushed to know that he didn’t have nearly as much time left with Caesar as he’d been hoping he did. He had no idea how long they’d been together already and how much time this was in comparison to what they’d already had, but it still didn’t feel like nearly enough.

Then, suddenly, there was less. The numbers on the screen flickered, and just like that the reading had become  _ 28 days _ .

Joseph’s eyes widened. “W-what the hell is going on?” he asked his pod in a harsh, frightened whisper. “Why is it dropping?”

The pod display dropped to  _ 21 days _ . “Requesting a mandate override may result in penalties being inflicted upon your current status. These may include loss of system credits or a reduction of deadline time.”

“Stop it!” Joseph demanded as the display fell to  _ 18 days _ . “Cancel the override!”

“Once an override is activated, it cannot be cancelled.”

“I don’t want to see the deadline anymore!”

“Once an override is activated, it cannot be cancelled.”

_ 10 days _ .

“Why the hell is it taking off so much? When is it going to stop?”

“Requesting a mandate override may result in penalties-”

“I don’t give a fuck about the penalties, just stop the override!”

_ 5 days _ .

“Once an override is activated, it cannot be cancelled.”

_ 72 hours. _

Joseph felt his heart pounding in his throat as he watched the numbers slowly drop down further. 72 hours fell to 48, then 36, then 24. Finally, they stopped, and the pod met him with an announcement in its usual humorless, automated tone. “Penalty reduction is complete.”

_ 18 hours _ . That was all Joseph had left.

Slowly, he stood up, his legs shaking underneath him. He dropped his pod and let it unceremoniously hit the floor. He hoped the cursed thing would break, but it clattered against the floor tiles, resilient as ever. He hated it. He hated the deadline. He hated the whole fucking system. Leaning against the ice-cold pane of the window, he stared out across the city, which suddenly seemed distant and empty to him. It had stopped snowing by then, and hazy moon shone clearly through the clouds.

Somewhere behind him, a pair of bare feet were padding cautiously across the floor. “Joseph?” Caesar’s sleepy voice called out to him. “What are you doing out here?”

He turned around and saw his boyfriend standing between him and the bedroom, his hair mussed and his eyes half-closed. Lies welled up in his throat before he could stop them. “Nothing, principessa,” he said. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

Caesar drew closer, laying a warm hand on his shoulder. “Is it bothering you again, tesoro?”

Something in Joseph’s heart snapped, and he felt tears spring to his eyes. He could lie with his words, but not with his face. His boyfriend didn’t say a word, only wrapped him up in his arms and held him, gently pressing his head down onto his shoulder. Joseph cried quietly for a minute, clinging to him, trying to drink in every last bit of warmth Caesar had to offer him. He wouldn’t be able to for very much longer.

“Come back to bed,” his boyfriend murmured against his neck. “I’ll talk to you until you fall asleep, okay?”

“Okay,” Joseph weakly replied. He let his boyfriend lead him back to their bedroom. Caesar laid down beside him and lived up to his promise, as he always did.

* * *

The sunlight coming through the window the next morning made Joseph feel sick. He wasn’t ready for it to come. He wasn’t ready for any of what was going to happen that day. 

He stuck close to Caesar while they made breakfast and headed out toward the sound garden, wandering around the city and looking through a few odd shops to see if there as anything worth blowing a their credits on to decorate their unit. The snow was already starting to melt by the afternoon, and Joseph tried not to think of how it would be gone soon, because that reminded him of everything else that would be gone too. He tried to remember what time it was that he’d seen the 18-hour warning on the pod. One in the morning? Maybe two? The sun was setting already. He and Caesar were leaving the sound garden, talking about finding a nice, warm indoor place to get dinner together. His boyfriend mentioned the restaurant in the entertainment district, the one with the al nero di seppia they loved so much. He could barely keep track of how much time was passing. It all seemed like a blur to him, moving too fast to make any sense, and he wished he could slow it all down but he couldn’t, no matter how he tried.

The sky was dark and they’d taken to the metro when, for the millionth time that day, Caesar squeezed his hand and asked, “What’s wrong, JoJo? You’ve had your head in the clouds all day.”

At long last, Joseph got together enough courage to speak up. He paused, taking a deep breath into his lungs. “Caesar, I... I have to tell you something.”

Caesar paused, stopping in his path and turning around to face Joseph. His expression was faintly worried. “What is it?”

“Have you, um... have you looked at your pod today?”

“No. I don’t have any alerts. Why should I?”

“Because...” Suddenly, Joseph was choking on the truth. Saying it out loud almost hurt. “C-Caesar, I.... when you found me last night...”

“Use your words, Joseph. What are you trying to tell me?”

“Just... just, check your pod. Please.”

Caesar’s hand thrust into the pocket of his jacket and brought up the tiny device in his palm. He took only a second to read the screen, and just like that the worry on his face turned into anger. Joseph could see the message just as clearly.  _ Your match has viewed your deadline. Click to view. _

“You didn’t,” he said coldly. 

“I couldn’t help it,” Joseph blurted out, unable to keep from rambling. “It was driving me insane. I had to know, Caesar. Please believe me. I needed to know.”

“You promised me you wouldn’t do this!” Caesar shouted at him. 

“I know, and I’m sorry! I had to see it. I just couldn’t take waiting around, not knowing-”

“So you went behind my back and did it yourself?” His words cut into Joseph, spearing him with guilt. “And you didn’t even have the decency to tell me when I saw you in the middle of it?”

“I didn’t know what to say!”

There was a silence between them, long and agonizing, as Caesar’s angry glare bored holes into his match’s soul. “At least tell me how much time we have left,” he said at last. Joseph’s throat was too tight to force an answer through, but silence was not sitting well with Caesar at all. “How much time, Joseph?!”

“Check it yourself!” Joseph choked out.

Reluctantly, Caesar did. He pressed his thumb to the screen, and the countdown flashed into existence.  _ 02 minutes _ .

Joseph watched his boyfriend’s face turn pale as his hand fell away and shoved his pod back into his pocket. He looked up at him, his green eyes despondent. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked.

“It’s my fault,” Joseph explained. “I asked the pod to use an override, and it told me there were penalties, but I didn’t listen. There was more left, I swear there was, but...”

“But you threw away the last of our relationship so you could lie to me,” Caesar finished for him. Joseph didn’t want to admit it, but that was the truth. It was closer to the truth than anything he would have been willing to say, anyway. 

“I-I didn’t mean for it to end like this.”

“It doesn’t matter what the fuck you meant!” his boyfriend snapped. “I trusted you, Joseph. We were supposed to be in this together.”

“And we were. We were for as long as I could stand it, but I couldn’t take not knowing!”

“Not knowing what? Why did knowing matter so much?”

“Because...” A train pulled into the metro station, drowning out the last of his words. He tried to step closer to Caesar, hoping he would listen, but his boyfriend only backed away from him. He shouted over the cacophony as the train hissed to a stop. “I couldn’t stand not knowing when I was going to lose you!”

Beside them, the doors of the metro slid open. Passengers started shuffling on and off, and in the midst of the noise, their alarms went off. Joseph didn’t see the screen of his pod flashing red, but he’d seen it too many times before not to know it was there.

“Well, you finally have your answer,” Caesar said coldly, taking a step back toward the train. “You’re losing me right now.”

“Caesar, wait!” Joseph lunged forward, but he was too late. Caesar had turned on his heel and stepped on board, and the doors had slid shut behind him. Joseph called out his name again as the metro pulled away from the station. His gaze followed Caesar’s face until it disappeared from his field of view.

He couldn’t stop the rush of what came next.  As the clicking of the metro train rattled its way down the tracks, he pulled his flashing red pod from his pocket and hurled it with all his strength at the wall of the tunnel. It bounced off the tiles and landed somewhere in the tracks. Joseph couldn’t be bothered to see where, because by then he’d stormed off to the stairs and left the station. He didn’t make it much further, only to the street, before he gave up and collapsed onto the edge of the sidewalk. 

_ Fuck the deadline _ , he thought bitterly.  _ Fuck the pods.  _ He dug his fingers into his hair and pulled, the heels of his hands scraping at the tears running down his face. _ Fuck everything about this stupid place. I don’t want to be here anymore. _

It didn’t last. A few minutes later, there was a metro worker in a bright yellow vest standing above him, nudging his shoulder. “Hey, mate,” they said, holding a hand out to him. “Did’ja lose this?” In their palm was his pod, a little scuffed and dirty, but all too intact. The screen was still flashing red.

“Yeah,” Joseph replied flatly. “Thanks, I guess.” He took the pod back, and the metro worker returned to the tunnels. 

He couldn’t return home. Until his pod told him, he didn’t have one. He wasn’t hungry anymore, either that or he didn’t think it was worth his time to go and get something to eat. Not knowing what else to do, he made his way back to the sound garden and sat down in the snow. The ground was wet, and the frost was turning grey and slushy, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Maybe strangers would think his face was red because of the cold and not because he’d been crying the whole way there.

It was nearly ten when Joseph got the notification that his single unit was ready for him to move in again. He staggered back to it, his body feeling half-frozen. He shed his wet clothes and fell into the bed with the cheap, shitty mattress that he hated, wishing more than anything that he didn’t have to be alone. He hadn’t been ready, still wasn’t ready, and he didn’t think he ever would be again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told you this wasn't the end. You'd better believe it isn't.  
> See you next chapter.


	7. [nobody]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just hitting me now that Christmas is happening only about a week from now. I hardly understand how the passage of time works anymore. I'm probably only going to have two more updates in this, because from this point on shit happens pretty quickly? It'll be this one and one more, so prepare your hearts and minds for that.  
> I hope all 408 viewers are enjoying themselves so far, although most of those 408 hits are probably people already following the story who come back and read the new updates. Makes me wonder why I keep putting my works in the crossover tags, since nobody else but me thinks to make weird mashups between canons and genres. Just wait until you all see what my next garbage adventure is going to be. That's going to be one fucking wild ride.  
> I'll warn you all now, this chapter is kind of a big sad, much like the second half of the last one. CONTENT WARNINGS abound. This time it's for behaviors indicative of DEPRESSION and a sprinkling MEANINGLESS SEX.  
> Thanks again @ Jasmine and cicada_s for supporting me in this endeavor, and I'd plug my tumblr here if that hellsite wasn't going to be fucking decimated by the time this chapter gets posted. I'm staying off the website for the coming week at the very least, so none of you will be able to find me there. Let's all strike together and convince the internet that it needs to have designated places where you can find weird shit like the stories and art made by sad, kinky bastards like me. We'd all deeply appreciate it. Grazie.  
> No more author note. Is story time now.

 

Time still had no meaning, even after he’d activated the deadline. Joseph laid about in his single unit, never looking at his pod, doing everything he could to ignore the fact that his heart perpetually felt like it had burst and was spilling blood and feelings all over the rest of his organs. He hated being alone, but he figured it was better than being stuck with a new match. That, though, was going to come eventually whether he wanted it or not.

It seemed cruel, the way the system ran; he’d thought about it before, but now it felt worse than ever. Taking people, sticking them together, giving them some set amount of time to fall in love before ripping them apart. If not that, then it was forcing total strangers to live and work within the confines of the same one-bedroom apartment, even if they came to despise each other. It didn’t seem to care if a match worked out or not. It just kept running as it was programmed and repeating the process over and over. No matter how much a match mattered to someone, they would be forcibly thrown away like a disposable toy as soon as the next one came along.

Caesar was not disposable, nor had he ever been a toy to Joseph. He was a person, and one he cared for more than he could comprehend. He didn’t want a new match. He only wanted him.

Joseph didn’t have a choice in the matter, though, because just four days after they’d been broken up, he was assigned a new match. He tried to get out of it; as far as he knew, the system couldn’t force him to leave his unit if he didn’t want to. However, it had its own ways of convincing members to cooperate, and his pod’s shrill alarm started screeching at him once he was more than thirty minutes late, only quieting down when he dragged himself out of bed and left his unit, headed in the direction of his next date.

The young man he matched with was smaller than Caesar had been, slender and graceful with an intelligent face, his eyes a muddy blue rather than pure, piercing green. He was angry about the lateness at first, but when Joseph explained his situation, he calmed down. They were going to be together for two months, so their deadline told them. He would surely be over his ex by then, and maybe a new match was exactly what he needed to help him move on.

He wasn’t, and it ended messily after Joseph said the wrong name in the middle of sex. His match didn’t speak to him for the entire last day they were together. Once he left, Joseph was alone again, and he figured the man he’d been with was probably better off on his own than being forced to put up with him. He waited for a new match to be assigned to him, but one never came. For a whole six weeks, not a single alert woke his pod from its perpetual silence.

Matches were relatively short from then on, and the stretches in between were consistently long and just as painful as ever. He met two more strangers, both relationships of a few weeks; in that time he got better at pretending he didn’t miss Caesar nearly as much as he did. He could play along with whoever he ended up with and act like he was happy, though it hurt him a little worse every time he did. 

A third match had just ended, and Joseph had been alone for eight days when his pod unpromptedly notified him that he’d received a speech-to-text from someone. It was a huge relief to hear the device go off, to pick it up and then not see that the system had thrown him in with yet another stranger. However, that feeling faded quickly and became an awful, sinking dread when he saw who had sent it.

_ New message from: Suzie _

_ Are you free? Please come over. Bring Caesar with you too. _

Joseph’s grip tightened on his pod, and he had to clear his throat to keep from choking on the response he had to give her.

“Caesar isn’t here anymore, but I can still come if you like.”

The pod was quiet for a few long, painful minutes before the response came back.

_ That’s terrible. I’m so sorry. But please come over, if you still want to. _

And he did quite terribly want to, so within the next half hour he was on the metro, headed in Suzie’s direction. When he knocked on the door of her unit, it was almost a solid minute of waiting before she opened the door. The lights inside her unit were low, and Joseph could see she had the shades drawn. The blue light of a TV screen reflected off the back wall, and the place smelled strongly of soy sauce and pizza grease. Suzie stood in front of the half-open door, dressed in wrinkled pajamas with her hair in a blonde rat’s nest, her face stained pink, eyes puffy and red from crying for god-only-knew-how-long. She took a second to regard Joseph, then her expression crumpled and she practically threw herself at him, latching her arms around his shoulders and sobbing openly against his chest.

“Bloody hell, Suze, what happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

Suzie shook her head, her face still buried in Joseph’s shirt. He held her still and rubbed her back, trying to comfort her until she had it in her to speak again.  _ God, why couldn’t I have had someone to do this for me? _ he wondered, then quickly realized just how selfish he sounded in his own head. He brushed the thought away and focused on calming Suzie down to keep himself from thinking about it any further.

Eventually she backed off and invited him in. She led Joseph over to her bed and sat down next to him, throwing the rumpled comforter around her shoulders. Takeout boxes littered the floor. “It’s been a week since I last set foot outside,” she said, knowing what he was about to ask. “It isn’t usually like this. I just haven’t had it in me to pick up around this place lately.”

“How long’s it even been since we last saw each other?” Joseph asked instead.

Suzie sighed. “Eight months. It’s what my pod said, anyway.”

“I... I’m sorry if this comes off sounding rude, but...”

“Yeah, my time just ran out,” she replied before he could finish. “She and I got separated a week ago.”

Joseph reached his hand out and placed it over Suzie’s. “Fuck. Suze, I had no idea. I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Nah. You should know why I asked you over. I just... I’m not good with being alone. Especially not when it’s like this.”

“I don’t know why the system enforces it the way it does.”

“It’s pointless. Just makes everything hurt worse.”

“I know. I hate it too.”

He waited a short while to let Suzie get her bearings again before he went on asking questions. “So... what happened?”

“I made a stupid mistake and ruined everything, as usual,” Suzie bluntly answered. “Her name was Lisa. She was perfect, and now she’s probably going to hate me for the rest of both our lives.”

“That can’t be true, Suze.”

“It probably is. She deserves better than me. I always knew she did.”

The story went something like this:

The morning that Suzie left Caesar and Joseph’s unit, she met her new match, who went by Lisa. She said it was a nickname, though Suzie never found out what for. She was older, tall with long dark hair and a presence that commanded every room she walked into; obviously a top, but willing to explore, and still with more than enough energy to keep up with her excitable match. Lisa was everything Suzie could imagine herself wanting in a woman, and she supposed that was where it all started going wrong.

She hadn’t gone into the relationship expecting she would idealize Lisa the way she did. She’d started out not expecting anything at all. Her matches before then had been little more than one letdown after another, and when she saw a deadline of more than 3 months and the absolute ethereal vision of a woman who’d been sitting across the brunch table from her, something in her head had simply clicked into place.

Lisa had pointed it out on a number of occasions, and Suzie had done her best to avoid it, but it came through all the same: she’d gotten too attached to Lisa too fast, and it had all turned codependent from then on out. She began caving to Lisa at every opportunity, tailoring herself to her match, bending herself out of shape to be the perfect little girlfriend and worshipping Lisa like a goddess. She was a manic pixie dream girl to the core; Joseph had started saying it as a joke, but deep down Suzie knew he was right. She had been at it for so long that she didn’t know how to be anything else. It was probably just an unfortunate misunderstanding that kept her from seeing that it wasn’t what Lisa wanted.

“She would point it out every few weeks, tell me that I was doing it,” Suzie mumbled through trembling lips, her eyes growing misty as she talked. “She kept saying that she wanted me to be a person, not a prop. I didn’t have to prostrate myself like that, she wasn’t asking me to... self-objectification, that was what she called it. Said I have problems with it, probably because of the stuff that always happened before I joined the system.” She paused to sniffle. “She offered to help me with it, but I kept saying no. I-I thought... I could do it on my own, I could learn to be myself, but then I realized that I was only doing it all over again, changing the image so that I could be what she wanted, and when she caught on and pointed it out again... It all happened so fast. We started fighting, we forgot it was our last day together, and she went out to go get some air, but then the alarms went off and I realized... I-I realized I’d never get a chance to make things right again.”

Joseph, who was now holding Suzie snuggled in his lap, gave her a squeeze to let her know he was still listening. “Dear god, Suze, that’s terrible,” he sighed. “You really liked her, didn’t you?”

Suzie shrugged. “I don’t even know if that’s all it was. She took a real vested interest in me, and it never fell apart like you and I did. That’s never happened before. Not once.”

“Do you think you were in love with her?”

The answer he got was Suzie wriggling around to face him and pointedly asking, “Did you love Caesar?”

Her question hit Joseph like a truck. “I... I still don’t know.”

“What happened between you two? I’m sorry I didn’t ask sooner.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. We, uh... you remember how we agreed not to check our deadline? Just let us both take our natural course?”

“You forgot that you had one at all, then got blindsided when it came up?” Suzie ventured.

Joseph lowered his gaze and sighed. “I wish it had been that easy.”

That got Suzie’s attention, and he went about explaining how he’d destroyed the one good thing that the system had given him. He described it all with excruciating detail, the memory still raw and painful in the back of his mind as if it had all happened only a few days ago. When it was over, Suzie was staring intently into his eyes, and he became aware that his vision was blurring. When he blinked, tears spilled over and rolled down his cheeks. Suzie reached out to wipe them away with her thumb. “I wish I could have been there to help,” she said.

“I didn’t know if it was right to ask,” Joseph replied. “I wouldn’t have wanted to ruin your time with Lisa.”

“Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t have fought nearly as much as we did,” Suzie suggested. “If she saw me really act like a person, maybe it could have been different.”

“I guess we’ll have to go the rest of our lives not knowing.”

They both went silent after that. A second later, as if by some random instinct, Suzie leaned in and started kissing him. Joseph kissed back, his body responding even though his mind felt as if it were miles away. Then his arms were around her waist, she was straddling him and rocking her hips against his, and they were both shelling each other’s clothes off and throwing them onto the floor. Suzie kept her condom stash in the bedside drawer, just where Joseph remembered she liked to have it; within minutes she had him on his back, stark naked and between her thighs, his hands grasping at her ass and her own clinging to the headboard of her bed while she rode him relentlessly and he canted his body sporadically against hers.

It went on longer than it should have. The two of them still felt empty, no matter how long they tried to hang on for. Eventually Suzie looked down at him and breathlessly said, “I don’t even know why we’re doing this.”

“I don’t either,” Joseph confessed. “It just feels like a reflex at this point.”

“I feel like we hardly even think anymore.”

“I guess this means we’re all just parts of the system now.”

Suzie bounced herself a few more times, trying to get something constructive out of Joseph’s cock being inside her, but nothing seemed to come of it. “I have something really weird to ask.”

“Ask away.”

“Would you, um... would you let me pretend that you’re her?”

Joseph stared up at her for a long moment, his heart heavy. “Only if I get to pretend that you’re him,” he replied.

They finished each other off like that, neither one really there, just bodies moving automatically to perform an action that no longer had any meaning. It felt like nothing, and when it was over, they lay cuddled together under the comforter, Suzie curled up and Joseph wrapped around her.

“I barely know what I am anymore,” Joseph said numbly.

Unfazed, Suzie replied, “Who ever does?”

* * *

That was the last time they met. Within a few hours, Joseph was being called out to join some stranger on another date that he didn’t want to go on, and Suzie’s pod went off in a similar fashion. They both reluctantly separated, pulled their clothes back on and agreed never to do something like this again. It hadn’t helped, not even a little. Joseph still felt hollow and broken, and judging by Suzie’s vacant expression as she watched him leave, he was sure she felt the same way.

Joseph’s date was brief, this match one of only 36 hours, and by the next day he was being called to another one. He barely remembered a thing about either of them. As far as he knew, life was going on, and whether or not he was in touch with it didn’t really matter. The world could keep on spinning without him having anything to do with it.

In one stretch of time alone, he found himself lying on the floor of his single unit, staring at the ceiling. He’d been watching some movie or another on the TV across from his bed, but he no longer had the energy to pay attention to it, or at least not enough to realize that the first movie had ended and the streaming service had automatically started playing another one. The lines between boredom and despondency became briefly blurred. In that time, he picked up his pod and held it in front of his face. “Is there anything to do?” he asked it.

“Five new attractions have been added for the fall,” the automatic voice replied. “Three are within a mile of your current location.”

Briefly, Joseph considered asking his pod to list them, but he recalled just what a nightmare going to attractions alone could be. There would be couples left and right, obnoxiously loud, obnoxiously romantic, more than enough to make his skull implode from the sheer pressure of the situation around him. He wouldn’t dare go out on his own, not when he felt like this. 

He knew it was a bad idea, but he lost his will for a moment and requested of his pod one more thing. “Can you contact Suzie for me?”

“I’m sorry, but the member you are trying to reach is currently matched,” the device warbled in its monotone response. “Members outside of a match may not contact others unless one of the matched individuals reaches out first.”

Joseph roughly tossed the pod onto his bed. He should have figured as much; this was the case with everything in the godforsaken system. He didn’t know why he’d even bothered asking. It was pointless to try. Time between matches was engineered to be torture; he’d realized that long ago, and yet he still didn’t quite seem to get it.

He wasn’t sure how long it had been since his last match. Three weeks, maybe? A month? It hardly felt like it mattered anymore. Matched or not, he wasn’t happy. He knew what would fix it, but he was damn sure that was out of his reach now. He’d ruined his chances with Caesar. There was no way in hell that the system would ever let him have his boyfriend back, not after that stupid mistake he’d made. Even if it did, then there was the lingering question of whether or not Caesar would even want him anymore.

The sudden chirp that issued from his pod came out of nowhere. It was a sound like no notification he’d ever heard from the device before. It wasn’t the shrill, annoying warning alarm of a conduct breach or the reaching of a deadline, nor was it the chipper  _ ping _ of a new match or date being assigned to him. This time it sounded like a short melody, just a handful of notes playing a cheery little chip tune jingle. Slowly, Joseph sat up and looked toward his pod. 

Its screen had lit up, meaning that for some reason or another, he was receiving an alert. He reached out and grabbed it, holding it up close to read the notification. The second he laid eyes on it, Joseph’s heart bolted up into his throat.

_ Congratulations! You’ve received your final match! Your pairing ceremony will be held tomorrow at:  _

There was an address and a time, but Joseph couldn’t be bothered to memorize them. His arm had gone limp and dropped into his lap. The pod, completely oblivious, went on with its saccharine, overexcited speech. “Congratulations! You’ve received your final match. Please arrive at the specified address at the specified time. There you will meet your final match, and the pairing ceremony will commence.”

Joseph picked the pod up and dropped it on his dresser, then moved to the bed to at least have something soft to sit on while he was forced to listen to the device’s spiel. He tried to tune it out. There were too many rules, too many damn details, and he couldn’t be bothered to keep them all in mind. The pod either didn’t know it was being ignored or didn’t care. “You may recognize some old faces in the crowd, but remember that this day is for you and your final match. Pay no mind to anything that might detract from your true happiness,” it rambled on. “Before you are paired and leave the system for good, feel free to spend your last night with any one person of your choice. Remember that you may only choose one. In this case only, you may visit your person of choice even if they are currently matched. Good luck, and best wishes for the rest of your life!”

The chime sounded again to close out the message, and Joseph’s eyes widened as he finally processed what had just been said. He sat bolt upright and grabbed his pod from his dresser. “I-I’m sorry, could you please repeat that last bit for me?” he asked it.

“Congratulations! You’ve received-“

“No, no, after that. Later, toward the end.”

“Pairing ceremony will commence-“

“Later! Toward the end!”

“Appropriate dress will be-“

“Come on, what part of  _ the end _ don’t you understand?”

Finally, the pod got it right. “Before you are paired and leave the system for good, feel free to spend your last night with any one person of your choice. Remember that you may only choose one. In this case only, you may visit your person of choice even if they are currently matched. Good luck, and best wishes for the rest of your life!”

Joseph’s grip clenched a little tighter on the pod and he felt his heart hammering at his ribs. One last night, with whoever he wanted. Without hesitation, he pressed the button again, eliciting a cheerful chirp from the pod to indicate that it was listening.

“I know who I want to see tonight.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy. Wonder who that's going to be.  
> See you next chapter.


	8. Caesar, finale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Cranbus.  
> For your present this year, I'm getting all 500 people who've read this story what might be my last post of 2018, depending on how the last week of the year goes. I'm finally resolving all the weird drama I've been throwing at you since November. Great way to celebrate the holiday season, right?  
> I hope you've had fun with Joseph on his wild ride through this wacky Black Mirror world. It's ending at long last. Leave kudos here if you're relieved.  
> Anyway, moving on, I want to thank my babes Jasmine and cicada_s one more time for encouraging me through this project and keeping me motivated and giving me the validation I so desperately need to keep on making weird and worthless stories like this one. I'm not getting any money for it, but being able to get these ideas off my chest is at least some kind of compensation.  
> Also I want to thank everybody who kept up with this story as it was aired chapter by chapter, everyone who left kudos, and especially all you lovely darling losers who left comments on every chapter. You're all what keeps this account alive, well, and continually producing dumb shit for you to enjoy.  
> Now that all the congratulations are in order, I'll go on and point out CONTENT WARNINGS for everyone who needs them. They aren't much different from any of the other chapters. Just alcohol mention and explicit sexual content. Also some extreme rulebreaking, but that's something we've come to expect.  
> Now go on and enjoy the last of what I've made you.  
> Happy Holidays.

 

He’d been hoping that the pod would place him at the restaurant in the entertainment district with the best pasta al nero di seppia in the city, but of course it didn’t, since lately the system didn’t seem to want to cooperate with him in any way, shape or form. Joseph sat at a corner booth far in the back of a warmly lit Thai place, nervously drumming his fingers on the table. He’d shown up early, unable to muster up the patience to do anything else. He turned his pod over in his hand to check the time on the screen. He only had eight hours to get this right; thirty minutes had already passed, and he was still alone at his table.

 _Maybe this was all a mistake_ , he thought to himself. _It was a stupid idea in the first place. I shouldn’t have expected him to want to see me ever again._

As soon as the statement crossed his mind, he heard the faint shuffling of the restaurant’s front door being pushed open. A soft autumn breeze drifted in, urging Joseph to look up. His heart began throbbing all over again when he saw his ex standing in the doorway. It took only a second for Caesar’s clear green eyes to find him, and as soon as they did he started rushing towards the table. Joseph’s body stalled for a second, as if it had forgotten how to move, then it jolted forward of its own accord and he fell against Caesar, wrapping his arms around his ex and burying his face into his tousled blonde hair.

Caesar latched on just as tight, his arms around Joseph’s waist and his hands clinging to his back, just as warm as they always had been. Joseph sighed softly as his ex nestled into the hug, and his conscience told him that they were standing like that for far too long and people were staring, but he just couldn’t find it in himself to care. For at least the next few hours, he had Caesar with him again, and he felt as if he’d finally come home after being away for far too long. It was just like seeing him at the pairing ceremony, only better, because this time he knew it was on purpose; he didn’t hesitate to speak the same words he’d wanted to say back then.

“God, I’ve missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,” Caesar whispered back to him.

Finally Joseph braced himself enough to let go of him and pull back to look him in the eyes. “What’s been going on with you?” he asked. “Where’ve you been, what’ve you been doing? Tell me everything.”

They sat down in the booth, the small space a snug fit for both of them. Caesar seemed tired just like he had the last time they’d reconnected. He poured himself a cup of tea from the pot brought to the table and took a slow, fortifying sip. “I’ve been through hell and back,” he said at long last. “I stopped counting my matches after I passed fifty.”

Joseph’s heart sank at the weary tone in Caesar’s words. “That many? Holy hell, how did you ever survive?”

“I barely did,” his ex replied, letting slip a laugh despite himself. “What about you?”

“Kept the same track record I did the last time we met. I probably got a pretty average setup: stuff that lasts a few months, sometimes just a day or two in between matches, sometimes weeks... well, most of the time, weeks.”

“That must have been torture.”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

Caesar gently nudged him with his knee. “Are you sure? Were any of them any good?”

“Not really,” Joseph confessed, letting his gaze fall to the table. “Almost every one of them ended in an absolute shitshow.”

“Why’s that?”

“I was still hung up on somebody else, and people don’t take that sort of thing very well.”

There was a pause, and he could practically feel the intensity of Caesar’s eyes on him. “If you don’t mind me asking, who was it?”

“I’m surprised you couldn’t guess yourself.”

“I don’t want to assume anything.”

“If you must know, I invited him here tonight.”

Caesar choked on a mouthful of tea, startling Joseph, who put a hand on his back to try and get him to cough it up. His ex shook him off. “I-I’m fine, I’m fine, you don’t have to.”

“Are you sure?”

“Y-yes, I am.” He paused, clearing his throat before meeting Joseph’s eyes again. “Do you really mean that?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I mean... I only get to meet up with one person tonight, and I couldn’t think of anyone in the world that I would want to see more than you.”

Caesar’s face softened and the look in his eyes was enough to melt Joseph completely. “I... I don’t know what to say,” his ex murmured. “I’ve been thinking about this for months, wondering if we’d ever get set up again like we did before. I wouldn’t make us go in blind like we did then. I should have known it would be too much.”

“Don’t put this on yourself, Caesar. It was my fault. I should have just let everything be. I was stupid and I wasted our time together on worrying about the future.”

“It can’t have only been you, tesoro. It was between us both.”

Joseph saw no reason to argue any further, so he left it at that. After a sip of tea, he asked, “Did the invitation tell you why I asked you to meet me here tonight?”

“No. I didn’t even get a hint. Why, is it important?”

“Yes, very much so.” Joseph took a deep breath and set his cup down before speaking again. “I’m, er... I just got my final match.”

Caesar’s eyes widened. “You’re getting paired?” he said numbly.

“Yeah. That was why the system let me arrange tonight,” he elaborated. “I’ll be leaving for good soon. The ceremony is tomorrow.”

“It’s tomorrow?”

Joseph nodded, finally gathering up the courage to meet Caesar’s gaze again. He had a look on his face that Joseph couldn’t quite parse, but there was a flutter of hope in his chest. At least, it was there until his ex spoke again.

“Mine isn’t.”

Just like that, the mood in the room had darkened and Joseph felt a cold sense of disappointment congeal in his chest and stay there. “Are you being paired too?”

“No. I’m still being run through the system like before. It hasn’t gotten any better.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for, Joseph.”

That didn’t change the guilt he felt. “I wish we hadn’t fought the way we did. If things hadn’t ended so badly for us, maybe it could have been different.”

“Or maybe it would have been all the same. The system’s always going to find a way to screw you over, no matter what you do.”

Joseph wished that wasn’t true, but he could only lie to himself so much. Together they’d been as close to perfect as Joseph could imagine anything being, but for some reason that just hadn’t been enough for the system. He didn’t know who he’d end up with; he hoped to god it wouldn’t be Colette, but there was no way to predict that. All he could be sure of was that it definitely wouldn’t be the one person he wanted to be with more than anyone.

“Why weren’t we good enough for it?” he asked, knowing damn well there wasn’t a real answer.

“Maybe it really does work like you say it does. This whole city is being run by a damn machine. It doesn’t really care who we love or how we feel or anything like that. It just runs us down until we finally crack and don’t have it in us to protest who it decides to match us with.”

“If I could have met you outside of this place, do you think it could have been different?”

Caesar smiled sadly and gently laid his hand on the table beside Joseph’s. “It might have.”

* * *

They tried not to waste too much time on dinner. Two hours were gone already by the time they left. They headed to their favorite club for memory’s sake, but there was no show or event scheduled that night, so they settled for wandering around the city as the stars came out and speckled the sky above them. Joseph wondered if they could maybe break into their usual swimming pool again, since the ban on the both of them had been lifted a long time ago. Caesar only laughed, reminding him that they didn’t have enough time for it.

There was no couples’ unit for them to come back to this time, so they had to settle for Joseph’s small, messy single unit. On the way back, they stopped at a grocery store to blow the last of Joseph’s credits on chocolate-covered strawberries and a bottle of pink champagne.

“It would be awkward if they’d somehow provided them to us,” Joseph mentioned as they made their way into his unit. He’d cleaned it up a bit, glad he’d been foolish enough to hope he would get this far.

“What makes you say that? It just means we’d have twice as much to go around,” Caesar said, setting the box and bottle on the small table by the kitchenette “That hardly seems like a problem to me.”

“You’ve got me there.” Joseph took down two tumblers from the cabinet. “I hope you’ll excuse the glassware. My guess is that the system doesn’t expect people to have guests over in the single units.”

“Hey, better than drinking out of the bottle,” Caesar teased, a smirk curving his perfect mouth. “Unless that’s what you’d prefer to do.”

Joseph laughed. “Oh, please. Don’t tempt me.”

The glasses were poured and went quickly in between bites of chocolate and strawberry. Caesar seemed to glow with a new light behind his eyes as he leaned back in his chair and laughed at nearly everything Joseph said. It felt as though something crushing had been lifted from both of them, at least for a little while. Even when their dessert started to run out and only three hours were left, the mood didn’t change. It only warmed and grew softer and heavier when Caesar leaned across the table and brought Joseph’s lips to his own.

The kiss was long, languid and heartfelt as Joseph pulled his ex into his lap and wrapped his arms around his waist. Caesar cradled his face in his hands, brushing Joseph’s skin with the warmth and calluses he’d missed so much. A fire was roaring to life in his chest, making him pull his ex tighter against himself, kiss him harder, deeper, open his mouth and taste the traces of champagne on Caesar’s tongue. Underneath it all was the rich, smooth taste he remembered, the addictive flavor he couldn’t describe as anything else but _him._

Caesar paused, just long enough to take a breath. “I’ve been waiting all night to do that,” he whispered against Joseph’s lips.

“I have too,” he responded, already breathless. “I needed it so badly.”

“I want more.”

They were pressed so close that Joseph was sure Caesar could feel his heart thudding against his ribs. “You do?”

“Yes.”

Joseph kissed him once more before giving his answer. “Do whatever you want to me, then. The way you used to. I miss it so much.”

Joseph’s bed was just big enough for the both of them to fit. Caesar led him, taking his hand and holding it even as he laid him back into the unmade mess of pillows and blankets and traced the lines of his body with his fingers. He bowed his head to shower him with kisses, covering his neck, chest and shoulders, making Joseph’s head tip back as an elated sigh escaped his lips. Then they were being kissed again, the taste of Caesar warm and heady in his mouth. He felt a stirring between his hips, the heat of arousal blazing in his core, and by then Caesar was already undressing him.

There was something lingering at the tip of his tongue that he wanted to say, though he quickly forgot what it was when he felt Caesar’s hand gently palming his cock. He gasped lightly and arched his hips up against his ex, begging for more contact. He saw only a flash of what Caesar took out of his pocket, then a second later he’d ripped the wrapper open with his teeth and rolled it over the length of Joseph’s cock. His mouth followed a moment later, his lips wrapping around the shaft and his tongue gently teasing the head. Joseph’s eyes rolled back and he moaned softly, his fingers coming down to tangle in Caesar’s hair. “C-Caesar... I...”

His ex paused and looked up at him. “Hm?”

“Y-you’re just... you’re so perfect...” Joseph hardly remembered how to think in the haze of pleasure. “Please, don’t stop.”

And Caesar didn’t, not until Joseph climaxed underneath him, panting and writhing in a moment of white-hot ecstasy. Then Caesar was all over him again, this time asking Joseph to tear his clothes off like he couldn’t stand being in them anymore, and mere minutes later both their outfits were scattered across the floor, the two of them bared and intertwined on the bed above. Joseph saw the gloves come out a second before he felt Caesar’s fingers inside him, pressing at all the spots even he had forgotten were there. He lost his breath all over again as he tossed his head back into the pillows and cried out, his eyes closed in rapture. In the middle of it, he felt Caesar’s lips against his neck, his ex’s free hand wandering all over his body.

“Dio mio, you’re so beautiful,” he heard him murmur.

“Caesar...” Joseph panted. “P-please... oh hell, I... I can’t even speak.”

“Tell me what you want, tesoro.”

“Y-you... Everything... I-I want...” It all settled down just enough for one moment of clarity. Through the haze, he looked directly into Caesar’s eyes. “Fuck me. Please.”

A hand came to rest on his thigh. Gently, his legs were pushed back and he gasped again as he felt Caesar sliding into him. His body caved in to it, his legs tightening around his ex’s waist, his arms around his neck, everything about him pulling Caesar closer and unwilling to let go. In that moment, Caesar was everything to him and all the rest of the system faded to static. There was only his scent, the heat of his body, and the friction between them as their hips ground together. Heavy breathing gave way to impassioned sounds, Caesar’s moans slowly pitching higher as he was worked up to a climax, Joseph’s shameless whimpers as Caesar wore his resolve down to nothing.

He came crying out his ex’s name as if they were still lovers, his voice just as raw as his body, tears of mindless pleasure streaming down his face. He felt the erratic shudders of Caesar losing himself not long after, and he held his ex as he rode out his orgasm. He collapsed on top of Joseph, heavy breaths ghosting warmly across his skin as he nuzzled his face against his neck.

It was over far too soon. Joseph focused only on Caesar draped across him, looking at him with those hazy, astoundingly green eyes, his body hot, flushed and beautiful. Joseph’s heart felt as if it had burst in his chest, and when he finally had it in him to speak again, he said the only thing that would come to mind.

“I love you.”

The drowsy smile faded from Caesar’s face, and for a moment Joseph was afraid he’d said the wrong thing. Then he saw the surprise in his ex’s eyes a split second before they were brimming with tears.

“Ti amo,” Caesar responded in a wavering voice that was barely above a whisper. Joseph hardly knew any Italian, but he understood exactly what that meant.

After it was over, the two of them huddled close together on Joseph’s bed, a blanket pulled up around them both as if that were enough to shield out the world. Neither of them dared look at their pods to know how much time was left. Any minute the dreaded alarm would sound, and that would be the last they saw of each other. Caesar was curled up around Joseph, his face nuzzled against his hair, while Joseph was clinging to him with an ear against Caesar’s chest, listening closely to the beating of his heart.

Without warning, Caesar asked, “How long have you been waiting to tell me?”

“I don’t know,” Joseph whispered in reply. “It took seeing you again to really hit me, I guess. I’ve always been bad at knowing what the hell my feelings are trying to tell me.”

“How long have you felt it?”

“I don’t know that, either. Sometimes I think it didn’t really sink in until I had to spend all this time without you. Others, though, I’m almost sure I felt it from the first night we met.”

“I think the same thing too,” Caesar said. He brushed Joseph’s bangs back from his face and kissed his forehead. “When I woke up and realized you were watching me...”

“I remember that all the time. It was like you knew something I didn’t. It just took me too damn long to realize what it was.” He sighed and cuddled closer to Caesar. “What about you? When did you realize it?”

“This is going to sound awful, but it didn’t get to me until right after we’d hit our deadline. When the metro pulled out of the station and I saw the look on your face, how you were still standing there... I don’t know what it was, but I just broke down. Everyone was staring at me and I just couldn't make myself stop crying. I wanted to come back for you, but I couldn’t.”

“A metro station is a terrible place to hit a deadline, isn’t it?” It was a weak attempt at a joke and it didn’t land, which didn’t surprise Joseph at all. “This whole place is sick.”

“You’ve said that before, JoJo.”

“I know. But... but all this coming out now? Right when I’m about to...” Joseph choked on the rest of his sentence. He couldn’t bring himself to say it; making himself remember would be the same as breaking his own heart.

Caesar kissed his forehead again. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” he whispered. “If we could just pick our own matches instead of waiting on the system, I would have chosen you in a heartbeat.”

“I love you.”

“I know, tesoro. I love you too.”

Hearing it a second time still felt like a shock. It was one which made Joseph’s whole body ache with longing. “Caesar?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to go.” His voice quivered, and when he blinked there were tears in his eyes. “I’m not ready.”

“Neither am I.”

* * *

 Deadlines came and separated them, and that was the end of it.

Joseph might have made some joke about parting being such sweet sorrow or some other quote he couldn’t recall how to source, but he no longer had it in him. When Caesar left his apartment to wander back to his own single unit at ass o’clock in the morning, when the sun hadn’t even thought about rising yet, all he felt was hurt.

He didn’t want to bother with showering. He laid down in bed and tried to get some sleep, but none would come to him. He felt as if a vital part of him had left along with Caesar, and he knew he was never getting it back, even though without it he barely felt like a person anymore. That was just how he was supposed to feel, he figured; this must have been what the system had been trying to accomplish all along. In some twisted way, it made sense. If someone no longer had a will to express dissatisfaction with their love life, then a match could be called successful.

Once the sun rose and started shining its obnoxious light through his windows, Joseph finally gave in and checked his pod. His ceremony would be at 2 PM that afternoon. He was supposed to arrive at noon, presumably so he could be prepped by stylists before getting presented to the crowd alongside his match. He had an address and, according to his pod, five more hours to get ready.

Joseph dragged himself out of bed to shower at long last and spent far too long shuffling through his closet to find something suitable to wear. After all, this was going to be an extremely public event. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to be a part of it.

When he stepped outside his building, he found an automated car waiting by the curb for him. He climbed in and was greeted by white suede upholstery on the seats, complimentary champagne, far too many roses for his taste and an automated message. “Congratulations!” the tinny recording announced. “You’ve made it to your final match! After your pairing ceremony has been completed, our system aides will personally send you on your way to your new, happy life!”

Joseph idly sipped the champagne while he listened to the recording continue its spiel. Once it finally concluded, it was replaced with chirpy orchestral music, the saccharine kind that played in elevators or shopping malls during the holiday season. He couldn’t wait for the ride to be over. Yet when it finally was, he took the sentiment back, because he saw a red carpet rolled out over an expanse of grass and a dense procession of people in neat grey suits, creating a narrow path to the shining glass doors of one of the big glossy postmodern buildings he knew was used exclusively for hosting events like these.

Everything that came after was one extended blur of walking into the building, being instructed on what he was to say during the ceremony, getting handed a tablet and being asked to write his vows despite his protests that he didn’t know who he was supposed to be writing them for. The last step was having concealer and contour and setting powder smeared across his face by stylists before finally being left to his own devices in a small flower-lined waiting room just behind the stage where he and his final match were supposed to be meeting. Just like the last ceremony he’d been to, the sheer amount of white in the decor was blinding. He wished he’d been able to have at least some say in the theme so he wouldn’t end up stuck in another bland old “white wedding” ending.

He fished his pod out of his pocket. Thankfully, the people in grey suits hadn’t taken it from him. He hadn’t failed to notice their presence every step of the way, watching him from the sidelines. There was something imposing about them, and he realized he’d seen the uniforms before: those people worked in security, keeping order of the system and ensuring the rules didn’t get too badly broken. It made him wonder why there were so many of them here at once. _Is it a common thing for people to try and run away during these ceremonies?_ he wondered. _Is that why they need to keep such a close eye on me?_ The thought alone was enough to send a shiver through him.

According to his pod, he’d be meeting his final match in half an hour, more or less. He could already hear the sounds of the crowd starting to filter into the guest area. Before long, he would be out there with them, professing his undying love for someone who he barely knew while dozens of other strangers looked on. He’d become just like that couple he’d seen at the ceremony with Colette, speaking vows that sounded copy-pasted from an advertisement, just another soulless promo for how “well” the system works.

Sitting still seemed too much for him right then. Joseph felt restless, so he got to his feet and began wandering in circles around the small room. It had two doors, one he’d been ushered through to get him in, and another that opened up onto stage left. Out of mere boredom, he decided to try the knob on the door back to the backstage area.

He’d taken it in his hand, expecting nothing. It was a complete surprise to him when it turned and the latch clicked free of the doorframe.

For a moment, he paused. This was taking things too far. Security was probably standing just outside, waiting for him try something fishy like this. If they caught him, he didn’t know what consequences he’d face. But here, it was hardly any different. Of either outcome, there was at least one he could be sure would be intolerable. The other had at least a chance of being something different, maybe something better. Pushing his hesitation aside, he opened the door and stepped outside.

The hallway to the backstage area was lined with security, just as he’d expected. They all eyed him with one collectively piercing gaze. It made Joseph feel guilty on the spot, and in his gut he felt an urge to back away, close the door and pretend this had never happened. He ignored that feeling and stayed on track, stepping out into the open space behind the stage. The security staff never let him out of their sight, their eyes burning holes into his soul, but he refused to let that deter him. He kept going, back through the prep rooms and past the people who had given him the tablet. He must have crossed a line at some point, though he wasn’t sure where, because all he knew was that suddenly, someone had grabbed his arm. “Excuse me, sir, but you’re not supposed to be back here.”

Joseph turned and was met with the cold, unblinking glare of one of the security guards. He tugged at his arm, trying to pull free of the man’s firm grip. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to get some air.”

“You can get it somewhere else. This side of the studio is dedicated to your match only.”

As soon as the words had left the guard’s mouth, an idea sparked in Joseph’s head. “Then I want to know who it is,” he said without thinking.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do that,” the guard sternly told him. “It’s against system policy.”

“Well maybe I’m not part of the same system as you, because I’ve been told we have a choice about some things.” Joseph kept pulling against the man’s grasp, but he refused to let go. Other members of the security staff were gathering at the corners of Joseph’s vision, all of them staring now at the scene he was causing. Not ideal, but he could work with it.

“You’ve already made your choices. Now the system has to make this last one for you,” the guard firmly told him. “Now get back to your side of the studio or we’ll have to remove you ourselves.

At long last, he let go, probably assuming Joseph would head back to his side and return to the small flowered room without complaint. And he did. Or he started to, anyway, just long enough for the security guards to look the other way. Once their eyes had left him, he spun back around and sprinted towards his match’s side of the studio.

Joseph vaguely heard someone shouting something at him, and he might have even heard his name being called, but he didn’t bother listening. One of the security guards managed to snatch the tail of his suit jacket, and he shrugged it off, making a beeline for the door at the other side. He lunged for the doorknob, and with security at his heels, he wrenched the door open and threw himself inside.

Joseph vaguely heard someone shouting something at him, and he might have even heard his name being called, but he didn’t bother listening. One of the security guards managed to snatch the tail of his suit jacket, and he shrugged it off, making a beeline for the door at the other side. He lunged for the doorknob, and with security at his heels, he wrenched the door open and threw himself inside.

The door was quickly slammed shut behind him, and Joseph leaned back against it, bracing himself with all his strength as security pounded against it. His final match was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. She just sprung out of it and whirled around to face him, and he recognized her on sight. Suzie stood in a knee-length white dress, her eyes wide with surprise. The look didn’t suit her, Joseph thought; it needed to be more retro, more unique, plus the flowers in her hair needed to be bigger and more colorful. The system couldn’t have gotten her more wrong if it had tried.

“Joseph, what are you doing here?” she dumbfoundedly asked.

“It’s you,” Joseph murmured back to her, just as shocked as she was. “I should have known it was going to be you.”

“Wait.” Suzie went quiet as she slowly reached a state of clarity in her mind, and somehow that got her even more surprised. “You’re...”

“Your final match?”

“The system picked you.”

“Certainly seems that way.”

He would have said more if security were not pounding on the door. Someone slammed it hard enough to rock Joseph forward and open it an inch before he forcefully pushed it shut again. Suzie glanced down and noticed the door had a manual lock, which she quickly reached for and turned. Joseph stepped away from the door, and though guards kept hammering on it from the other side, the door didn’t budge. “How long do you think that’ll hold them?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Suzie frankly replied. “Maybe a few minutes. Someone is probably going to have to find a key.”

“Is that long enough for us to talk?”

Suzie looked up at him, the look on her face somewhere between confused and concerned. “What is there left to talk about? We’re already here.”

“But do you really want to be?”

That drew a long, confused silence out between them. “That’s certainly an odd thing to ask someone on what’s basically your wedding day,” she remarked.

“I want to know, Suzie,” Joseph insisted. “Please. I need you to be honest with me. Do you want to be here or not?”

Suzie stared at him, her mouth open and her lips trembling like there was something she wanted to say, but she seemed to have thought better of it, because a second later her whole demeanor had faded and she shrank back, looking away and twisting her hands together.. She seemed to be hesitating, like she knew what the truth was but felt too ashamed of it to say it out loud.

“Whatever you want to say, Suzie, I promise I won’t be upset about it,” Joseph assured her.

After a far-too-long silence, the answer finally came. “I... I don’t know.”

Joseph chewed his lip and nodded. “This isn’t right. We’re not meant to be here.”

“Clearly we must be, or at least as close to right as the system could get.”

“Because you’re the only relationship I had that never got ridiculously rocky, right?” He paused, waiting for her to respond, but the only reply he got was more stunned silence. “What does that even mean? We had issues, they just weren’t ones we could sort out in a regular way. We weren’t even together long enough for anything cataclysmic to happen. One uneventful trial run doesn’t prove a damn thing.”

Suzie finally met his eyes again, looking far more tired than seemed right in that moment. “I like you, Joseph. I really do.”

“But do you love me?”

Suzie looked like she desperately wanted to say yes, but something was holding her back. Joseph had a feeling he knew what it was. “You remember what happened with us the last time I saw you, don’t you?”

Silently, she nodded. “We’re going to be a disaster,” she quietly confessed. He saw tears springing to her eyes just like they had the last time he’d seen her. “I’m still thinking about Lisa. I... I saw her again last night. She’s matched with some other woman now, but she told me... told me she’d leave her and come back to me if she could. We both said so many things that won’t mean anything after this.”

“You should go find her.”

Judging by Suzie’s reaction, Joseph may as well have told her to sprout wings and fly away. She stared at him, mouth open in shock. “I... I can’t. They’re already mad about you being here. They’ll never let us out.”

“Going back isn’t the only way we can leave.”

“What?” Suzie glanced at the door to backstage, then the one that would lead out to where she and Joseph would have to perform for the crowd in only a few short minutes. “Joseph, how can you be sure that’s any better?”

Before anything resembling an explanation could be given, the lock clicked and the door swung open. Joseph quickly grabbed the handle of the other door with one hand and Suzie’s arm with the other. “No time to think about it! Let’s go, now!”

He threw the door open and spilled out onto the stage, pulling Suzie along with him. Some in the crowd gasped, others screamed or shouted, and the security team swarmed onto the stage after them. Suzie took the lead and Joseph chased after her. Even more security guards were materializing out of the crowd, banding together in front of the door. Knowing the system, every other exit in the building was probably blocked off as well.

 _Not_ all _the exits_ , pointed out the mischievous part of Joseph’s brain. He realized then that an entire building being made of glass might have its drawbacks. It would be expensive to fix, for sure, but he’d be long gone by the time they got around to that.

Joseph reached for one of the atrocious white vases that decorated the space and dumped the flowers out before hurling it at one of the vast window-walls. The chunky thing sent cracks spidering across the surface. Almost there, but not quite. Without a second thought Joseph threw himself shoulder-first against the wall.

The glass shattered on impact and suddenly Joseph was falling. A second later he’d hit the ground, landing hard on his feet and toppling over onto his side. Suzie crashed right next to him, landing on her back and gasping; clearly their exit point had been higher than anticipated and the fall left them both winded. Still, Joseph forced himself to sit up, ignoring the feeling of glass shards grinding into his palms. One quick glance to either side told him that the system was already onto them: guards were emerging from the building in a seemingly endless stream of grey. He reached out for Suzie to find she was already standing. Her hands grabbed him by the wrist and the broken glass crunched under him as she dragged him forward. “Come on,” she wheezed. “We have to go.”

He staggered after her for a few steps, then broke into a dead sprint. The both of them ran like their lives depended on it, tearing across the grassy knolls of the park until they reached the street. Security was at their heels, and the streets were just about devoid of anything that would help them. The nearest metro stop was five blocks away, Joseph knew, and he was almost sure that the swarm of security guards would catch up to them. Then in the corner of his eye, he spotted a pair of automated cars pulling up to the curb, where a couple was being separated. Suzie must have seen it too, because not a second after he’d seen it, she had taken off towards it and wrenched the driver’s side door open.

Joseph followed her, ignoring half the match’s request to know what the hell was going on as he roughly shoved the man out of his way and dove into the passenger seat. He’d never seen the front seat of an automated car, and he’d been right to assume that there was nothing resembling gas pedals or a steering wheel, nothing that would allow the vehicle to be controlled by a human. There was, however, a touch screen, and Suzie had sorted out what it was for faster than he had, because she was already typing in an address. She then pressed a button under the dashboard and gunned the engine. The car roared to life before peeling away from the curb and rushing down the street.

At long last, Joseph felt like he could breathe again. He leaned back in his seat and heaved a deep sigh of relief. “Fuck... that was intense...”

Suzie curled up in the seat next to him, pulling her knees to her chest. She leaned against the door of the car, staring through the windshield. “I’ve never been chased like that before,” she mused. “Never had to run like that before, either.”

“I have. Only once, though.”

She glanced over at him, smiling a little. “You never told me that story.”

He laughed a little bit. “Maybe some other time. After we get all this sorted out.”

His ex nodded in agreement, and the two of them sat quietly as the ride progressed. They glanced occasionally through the back windshield, but strangely enough, it seemed they weren’t being followed. Joseph had been sure that security was chasing after them, yet they were nowhere to be seen. Abandoning a pairing ceremony was probably unheard of. But then, if it was, why were there so many guards present in the first place?

“I don’t understand it,” Suzie said. “They made everything so tense and awkward. All standing around us, looming over us like that.”

“Like they expected us both to bail?”

“Yeah. Like they were going to force us to go through with it, even if they had to drag us onstage themselves.” She paused, chewing her lip. “All for the sake of the system, isn’t it? Can’t risk their perfect image.”

“Of course they can’t.” Joseph glanced at the touch screen, which now showed an overhead map of the surrounding area, their car denoted by a blinking blue dot and their destination highlighted in red. “What address did you enter? I’d kinda like to know where we’re headed.”

“I hope this doesn’t make me sound weird, but I remembered Lisa’s address from last night,” Suzie replied. “It just stuck with me. I guess this was the reason why I needed to remember it.”

In the next few minutes, the automated car had pulled up to the sidewalk and rolled gently to a stop in front of a tall, glossy apartment building. Joseph knew the couples’ complexes when he saw them. “God, I hope her match isn’t too angry when she sees you come in,” Joseph said.

“Yeah. But I don’t think she’ll put up too much of a fight,” Suzie pointed out. “They’re not very attached. Lisa told me that her match is almost like a stranger to her. Besides, they’ve only been together for a week. Not like I’m breaking up a marriage or anything.”

“Well... I guess this is goodbye, then.” He smiled at her. “Good luck running away with her. And hey. I know we won’t be able to stay here after this, so I hope you don’t mind me asking, but... do you think we could meet up again after we’re out of here?”

Suzie laughed. “The old we-can-still-be-friends line, huh?” She scooted close to him and pulled him into a hug. “Of course we can still be friends.” They held each other tight for a second before letting go again, and Suzie opened the door to step out onto the sidewalk. “Now go get him! He’s waiting for you!”

He hadn’t even needed to tell her who he was going to see after she left, and he smiled, glad that the system had at least one other person who knew him so well. She slammed the car door shut, and Joseph gave her a playful salute through the window. He got one back from her before she ran off and disappeared behind the revolving doors of the building. He then looked down at the touch screen. The prompt, which he’d conveniently missed before, read _Touch to enter your destination._

Joseph sat for a second, feeling lost. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go from here. Then he remembered his pod. He still had it in his pocket, and as far as he knew, it wouldn’t be cleared and restored to its factory settings until he had left the system for good. He hurriedly fished the device out of his pocket and pressed his thumb to the screen to unlock it. “Show me where Caesar is.”

The pod pinged its acknowledgment of his request, and the spinning loading animation flashed on screen. Then it disappeared. “I’m sorry, your request was a little too general. Can you please specify what you are trying to-“

“You know damn well which Caesar I’m talking about. Show me where he is.”

His pod didn’t give him a ping this time. The device was dead silent. Joseph stared at its dormant screen, wondering for a second if he’d made a mistake. Then the loading animation appeared again and the tinny automated voice said, “Searching for system member _Caesar_.” A map appeared on the screen, dropping a red pin at his current location. Joseph knew the layout of the streets- it was a singles’ complex in the northern reaches of the city- but that wouldn’t help the automated car. “Good. I need the address.”

Obedient as ever, the pod gave it to him. Strangely, Joseph felt compelled to thank it. Then he entered the address into the touch screen and the car was off once again.

Joseph’s stomach was in knots the whole ride there. He didn’t know what he’d say to Caesar when he arrived. His ex knew where he was supposed to be right then. What would he think when he saw him at his door after abandoning his own pairing ceremony? Worse yet, what if security had been alerted? What if they were tracking this car right now, and when he stepped out he would be intercepted by yet more security guards? Whatever would happen, it was too late to back out now. Joseph had nowhere to go but forward.

The car stopped in front of one of the grey concrete facades that Joseph recognized so well. He realized that he’d never seen where Caesar lived when he wasn’t with him. The complex was a little nicer than his, with a postage-stamp garden and hedges out front. Other than that, it was unremarkable. He pushed onward through the entrance and took the elevator up to the fifth floor.

Before he knew it, he was standing in front of the door. He was lost for a moment, wondering if maybe his pod had purposely misled him. He brought out his pod one more time and asked, “Are you sure this is the right place?”

The pod gave him no answer. He looked at the screen and saw it had gone dark. The thing had probably been shut off after he’d broken the most vital of the system’s rules. If this was the wrong apartment, he figured he had nothing to lose anymore. He couldn’t wait forever. Joseph raised a hand and knocked on the door.

There was a faint shuffling from inside. A moment later, the door opened and there he was. Caesar stood in front of him in a cream-colored sweater and a pair of faded jeans. He looked tired at first, rubbing his eyes before he looked outside, then it all fell away when he saw Joseph. His vivid green eyes went wide with shock.

Joseph drew in a breath and tried to speak. “Caesar, I-“

He didn’t get a chance to say anything more. One second Caesar was standing in the doorway, frozen, and the next he’d flung himself out into the hallway and grabbed Joseph by the collar of his shirt, pulling him close and pressing his ex’s lips to his own. Joseph melted against him, wrapping his arms around Caesar and grasping at the back of his sweater. He couldn’t get enough. Finally, his ex fell away from him, needing to breathe, finally giving Joseph a good look at his face. He saw that Caesar had started crying at some point. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he choked out.

Joseph brought a hand up to Caesar’s cheek and wiped away a stray tear with his thumb. “They couldn’t keep me away,” he said. “I wouldn’t... I _won’t_ let them.

His ex sniffled and brought a hand up to clear his eyes. “B-but... your pairing ceremony... your final match. What about...”

“Suzie and I both decided we want no part of it,” he clarified. “She’s got her reasons, and I’ve got mine.” He smiled down at him. “I’ve got you.”

Finally he saw the fog starting to lift in Caesar’s eyes. “Joseph... they’re going to find us. This isn’t how things were supposed to happen. You know the system lets you choose, but not this much.”

“I know. Security already chased me out of the venue. That’s why I came to get you now. We can’t stay here.”

“Y-you mean-“

“Yes. I’m asking you to run away with me.”

Caesar stared at him, and right then Joseph was sure that he was far past the line between brave and stupid. That didn’t stop Caesar from taking his hand and holding it tight between both of his own. “Lead the way,” he said. “I’m sick of this hellhole. I don’t care where we’re going as long as I’m with you.”

Joseph’s heart squeezed in his chest and he felt heat rising inside him. “God, I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” Caesar decisively said. He pulled Joseph in for one more kiss. “Now let’s get out of here.” He ducked inside just long enough to put some shoes on, and the two of them set out down the hallway, hand in hand.

The automated car that had brought Joseph there was gone. He didn’t know how long it would take them to walk anywhere. They headed for the metro and slipped into the station, boarding the first train that passed through. “We’ll ride to the last stop,” Caesar said. “That should take us to the edge of the city. Once we’re there, we’ll walk until this place is behind us.”

Joseph nodded, putting his arm around Caesar to hold him close as they huddled in the corner of the metro car. With every stop, the crowd of passengers thinned out further. Finally, at the very end of the line, they were the last ones left in the car. They rushed out and into the street, and Joseph spied the spires of a towering suspension bridge. They headed toward it without hesitation. That had to be the way out. Cars were rushing past as they climbed up from the city street onto the footpath in the middle of the bridge.

The sky above them, which Joseph distinctly remembered being clear and blue when they’d emerged from the metro station, slowly grew grey and muddy as they gradually distanced themselves from the system’s city. A fog seemed to be descending over the horizon, and he had to guess at what would be in front of them when they reached the other side. A highway, probably. Or another city. He found it strange that he couldn’t remember what was out there.

Caesar’s hand tightened on his for a second. “Hey, Joseph.”

“Yeah?” he responded, glancing over to his ex- who, he now figured, he could probably call his boyfriend again.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

He shrugged. “Home, probably.”

“And where is that?”

The question made Joseph pause. When he looked at Caesar again, he saw that his boyfriend looked uncertain, almost scared. Seeing him like that was worrying to say the least, and Joseph started to feel much the same way. “I... I’m not sure,” he confessed. “London, I guess. I remember that place really well. But... maybe New York instead. I remember being there, too.”

“Is Venice off the table? That’s the place I remember best.”

“We can visit all three of them. I guess it remains to be seen which we’re closest to once we’re out of here.”

Caesar nodded, squeezing Joseph’s hand in his and seeming content enough to leave it at that. He leaned on him, sticking close as they walked further on the bridge. Joseph tried to stay focused on Caesar’s presence beside him, his warmth, the little bit of contact from having his hand in his own. The fog was growing thicker, the whole horizon before them fading into one big cloud of flat slate grey. It looked almost like they would be stepping into oblivion when they reached the other side of the bridge. Still, they kept walking.

The bridge didn’t end on a highway like Joseph had been expecting. It didn’t even end in a place at all. It seemed to simply be disappearing as they walked. It was solid before, but then the grey started to seep through it. It grew transparent, and eventually it was gone altogether.

Joseph and Caesar were standing in the middle of a vast blue-grey void. When they looked back at the place they had left, there was nothing there. The grey had surrounded them. Joseph felt like this should have been wrong, and yet it didn’t feel that way at all. He looked to Caesar and asked, “Do you have any idea where we’ve ended up?”

Caesar was quiet for a moment, chewing at his lip as he thought. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we should keep going. There has to be something up ahead.”

They kept moving, driven forward by a compulsion that Joseph couldn’t explain. The grey never changed, but instead of seeming empty and unsettling, it was comforting. It felt right, somehow.

“Do you think we’re meant to be out here?” Caesar asked.

“Of course we are,” Joseph said. “I think this is where we’re all meant to end up.”

“Everybody clips off the map in the end, don’t they?”

Joseph looked over at his boyfriend, eyebrows raised. “What?”

“Didn’t we say before that this was all a simulation?” Caesar went on as they forged ahead. “Maybe that was the truth all along.”

From over his shoulder, Joseph heard a faint _blip_ , a noise that felt strangely familiar despite the fact that he could have sworn he’d never heard it before. He looked up and so did Caesar. There was a white circle suspended in the air between the both of them, and in the center there was a number. _998._

Joseph wanted to ask what it meant, but he felt there was no need. It would all make sense when they reached the end. Out in the distance, he saw things approaching. They kept going forward, when the closest one was finally in their line of sight, he recognized it was a couple. Two men. One taller than the other, short, spiky brown hair and golden waves. Him and Caesar. Perfect copies, he somehow knew, with even more behind them, a herd sprawling into the distance with more incarnations of them than he could possibly count. Every single one was basically the same as them. They were walking in from different directions, but they’d gotten here the same way, and they were all going to the same place.

Finally he and Caesar reached a point where it felt right to stop. This was right where they needed to be. Staying close, they looked around at the multitude of themselves. They were gathering around something, organizing in one concentrated spot. Joseph was the first to look up and notice the massive white circle hovering overhead, and Caesar followed his lead.

Then, one by one, each version of them began to dissolve. They broke apart into shimmering masses of pixels and rose up, fluttering into the circle above. A message in the middle appeared in bold white text, numbers flashing, growing ever higher as one incarnation after another was taken up.

Joseph- or at least, the one he knew he was- turned his gaze back down at Caesar, who met his eyes once more. He raised a hand and cradled his boyfriend’s cheek, leaned down and kissed his forehead. This was the ending they had wanted, he realized. When Caesar tilted his head up to meet his lips, Joseph was sure that he knew it too.

Before long, they had broken apart and drifted into the sky too, just like all the others. It was peaceful, warm and perfect. All was right. Once they were all gathered into the circle and the calculations had been run, the message in the sky finally reached its end.

_998/1000 simulations successful._

_99.8% match_

* * *

Music rang in Joseph’s ears as he leaned against the bar, staring down at the screen of his phone and the reading he was being shown. A photo of a young man with tousled blonde hair and piercing green eyes smiled up at him. He read the percentage over a few times to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. It definitely said _99.8%_ , no doubt about that. It was higher than anything he thought would be possible. Must have been a fluke in the system, he figured. No way a match could be that perfect.

Suzie leaned over his shoulder, sipping on her cranberry vodka. She reached out and tapped the screen with her fingertip. “That’s a really good reading,” she commented. “You should go for him.”

He looked over at his friend, mildly startled. “Hey. You’ve got your own readings to worry about, don’t you?”

“I do. But you haven’t decided to follow through on any of them yet, and I’m not gonna get up and go for mine until you’re doing it too.”

“I’ll be fine on my own, Suze.”

“Sure you will.”

Joseph sighed and looked over at Suzie’s phone. “What do yours look like?”

“I’ve got a few in the same region. You came up, actually.”

“I did?”

Suzie nodded, flashing the screen at him. In her version, they’d managed to score a 73.4. “I’d take it as a good sign if it weren’t, you know...” she shrugged. “Been there, done that.”

“So if you’re not gonna whisk me off my feet and carry me to the nearest chapel,” Joseph teased, “who are you planning to go for?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out when it’s the right time,” she said coyly, turning around and looking over her matches herself.

Joseph read the screen over her shoulder as Suzie shuffled through a set of mediocre matches. Then the photo of a dark-haired woman with faded blue eyes came up, one that Joseph was sure he recognized, underscored by a bold white _98.4%_. His eyes widened and he tried to snatch the phone out of Suzie’s hand. “Wait! Suzie, is that my mom?!”

Suzie started laughing, deftly parrying Joseph’s hands. “Hey, hey! I’m a grown man, I can make my own decisions!” she squealed.

 _“_ Suzie, you are _not_ going to date my mom.”

“Hmf! Watch me,” his friend giggled, taking a step back and clutching her phone to her chest. She reached out and pushed Joseph’s phone toward him. “You’d better follow that lead the system gave you. You don’t get one like that every day.”

Joseph sighed and looked down at his match. It was ridiculously good, too good to be true. “What if it’s a mistake?”

“Do you think that a thousand simulations would make a mistake?” Suzie tossed back. “If a digital copy of you and one of him just so happen to be perfect for each other almost a thousand times over, I don’t know what about that seems accidental to you.”

“What if he didn’t even show up tonight?”

“There’s no way to find out if you never look.”

With that, Suzie stepped back from the bar, a smirk tugging at her lips. She raised a hand to her forehead and gave Joseph a playful salute. He gave one back to her before she disappeared into the throng of strangers in the bar. The music picked up, a staccato of guitars and snare drums filling Joseph’s ears as he fixated on the face on his phone screen. The song that was playing seemed to be reaching right into him, and finally he worked up the courage to look up and scan the crowd for someone named Caesar.

A little ways across the dance floor, he spied a pair of bright green eyes watching him. His heart skipped a beat when he recognized the stranger’s face. Caesar was holding his phone in his hand in much the same way that Joseph was, overcome by a look of faint surprise. He seemed just as hesitant to believe the number they’d been given was real.

Against all odds, Joseph found it in himself to smile. Caesar did the same. They held each other’s gaze for a moment. Joseph’s nerves kept him from speaking, and the music went on thrumming between them.

_Burn down the disco_

_Hang the blessed DJ_

_Because the music that they constantly play_

_Says nothing to me about my life..._

Slowly, their smiles faded. Joseph chewed at his lip. What was he supposed to do? Did Caesar expect him to move in first, or to say something suave? Should they even bother with flirting when the match already looked like it did?

Eventually the smile returned to Caesar’s face. His match took a deep breath, left the spot where he’d been lingering and started walking towards Joseph.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ  
> Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ
> 
> Merry Crisis to all and to all a good 20gayteen.  
> Goodnight.

**Author's Note:**

> Are you still strapped in? Yes? Good, because this is just the beginning.
> 
> If you don't hate me and want to see more of my work, please leave me a kudos or a comment or a bookmark or anything to let me know you're out there somewhere.  
> Or follow me on tumblr at lord-ravioli. Your choice, really.
> 
> See you next chapter.


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